News From U-M

Three U-M researchers named 2011 MacArthur Fellows

Three University of Michigan researchers— historian Tiya Miles, chemist Melanie Sanford and  stem cell biologist Yukiko Yamashita—are among the 22 new MacArthur Fellows announced today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each will receive $500,000 in "no strings attached" support over the next five years from the MacArthur Foundation. Read More

Biomedical, Faculty Honors, Humanities and Arts, Physical Sciences

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Raising a child doesn’t take a village, U-M research shows

It doesn't take a village to raise a child after all, according to University of Michigan research. "In the African villages that I study in Mali, children fare as well in nuclear families as they do in extended families," said U-M researcher Beverly Strassmann, professor of anthropology and faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). "There's a naïve belief that villages raise children communally, when in reality children are raised by their own families and their survival depends critically on the survival of their mothers." Read More

Social Sciences

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Positive thinking: Optimism lowers risk of having stroke

A positive outlook on life might lower the risk of having a stroke, according to a new University of Michigan study. A nationally representative group of 6,044 adults over age 50 rated their optimism levels on a 16-point scale. Each point increase in optimism corresponded to a 9 percent decrease in acute stroke risk over a two-year follow-up period. Researchers analyzed self-reported stroke and psychological data from the ongoing Health and Retirement Study, collected between 2006 and 2008. The findings appear in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. Read More

Biomedical, Social Sciences

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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

Natural Sciences

Black Hole illustration

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

Physical Sciences

Brain Training

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

Education

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

Natural Sciences

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Cell phones helping to bridge the digital divide for low income teens, but online visits costly

Without Internet access at home, teens from low income households are more likely than their wealthier counterparts to use their cell phones to go online. But those teens with the least money who are using their phones for Internet access are likely paying the most to get online, according to a new study by UM researchers Katie Brown, Scott Campbell and Rich Ling.  Read more

Social Sciences

Health care policy, innovation institute planned at U-M’s North Campus Research Complex

A new health care policy institute – one that is expected to become one of the largest of its kind in the nation – will be established at the U-M's North Campus Research Complex. The Institute’s mission is to enhance the health and well-being of local, national and global populations through innovative, interdisciplinary health services research. More than 500 researchers could eventually join the new Institute on the NCRC campus with many more engaging virtually, making it one of the nation’s largest concentrations of healthcare policy and services researchers. Read More

Biomedical, Public Health, Public Policy, Social Sciences

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Probe human diseases in yeast? Possibly, protein study suggests

The molecular-level workings of proteins are surprisingly similar across a wide range of organisms, from humans to fungi and plants, research by U-M  evolutionary biologist Jianzhi "George" Zhang and colleagues suggests. This finding raises the possibility of using much simpler organisms, such as yeast, to study the mechanisms underlying human disease. The study is scheduled to be published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of May 9.  Read More

Biomedical

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