News From U-M
Ancient whale skulls and directional hearing: A twisted tale
Skewed skulls may have helped early whales discriminate the direction of sounds in water and are not solely, as previously thought, a later adaptation related to echolocation. University of Michigan researchers report the finding in a paper published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read More
X-ray telescope finds new voracious black holes in early universe
Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, U-M astronomer Marta Volonteri and her colleagues have found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies. Read More
Brain training can boost kids’ intelligence
Children who "train" their brain to increase memory can also boost their abilities to solve problems and reason, a new University of Michigan study indicated. Susanne Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides and Priti Shah, all researchers in the U-M Department of Psychology, conducted the study. Read More
Nanoparticles may help inhibit Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders
Nanoparticles of the right dimensions and shape may be the key in combating the plaque that destroys neurons and leads to symptoms associated with Alzheimer's disease, a new report shows.
U-M chemical engineering professor Nicholas Kotov says the nanotechnology means can attract and capture the longer fibrils that are known to form plaque related to neurodegenerative disorders. Read More
U-M researchers find potential new way to fight sepsis
By digging a little deeper, researchers may have found a potential target for reversing the deadly blood infection sepsis. Scientists at the U-M Health System looked at microRNA, a type of RNA that does not code for a protein itself but that can regulate the expression of other genes and proteins. They found that by attacking the right microRNA they could influence a key trigger of inflammatory diseases such as sepsis. Read More
U-M International Center for Automotive Medicine enters new era
The University of Michigan International Center for Automotive medicine this week marked the beginning of new capabilities and new collaborative research combining trauma medicine, state-of-the-art computer analysis and automotive engineering.
“Our mission is to better understand, treat and prevent crash injuries. And to really understand injuries requires doctors and engineers working together in equal partnership,” says the center’s founder and director Stewart Wang, M.D., Ph.D. Read More
A brain training exercise that really does work
Forget about working crossword puzzles and listening to Mozart. If you want to improve your ability to reason and solve new problems, take a few minutes every day to do a maddening little exercise called n-back training. UM psychologist John Jonides presented new findings to the Association for Psychological Science that showed that practicing this kind of task for about 20 minutes each day for 20 days significantly improves performance on a standard test of fluid intelligence—the ability to reason and solve new problems, which is a crucial element of general intelligence. And this improvement lasted for up to three months. Read More
Toward efficient harvesting of solar energy
Conventional means of collecting solar energy, solar cells for example, have been notoriously inefficient. Now a team of chemical engineers at U-M is exploring new means of exploiting the abundant energy produced by Earth's nearest star. They have discovered a method for utilizing metal nano-particles, which act much like nanometer-sized light antennae, to help accelerate the production of renewable solar fuels and other chemicals. Read More