ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Typhoons thrash the Philippines every year, causing flash flooding and mudslides that often kill hundreds of people in the Southeast Asian nation. Many blame the death and destruction on the wrath of nature. But Gavin Shatkin has a different view.
“Disasters are not natural,” said Shatkin, an associate professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan. “They happen because of social structures.” (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— The fastest wind ever discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole has been observed by a team of astronomers that includes a University of Michigan doctoral student.
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting telescope, they clocked the record-breaking super wind at about 20 million mph, or about 3 percent of the speed of light. This is nearly 10 times faster than astronomers had previously observed from a stellar-mass black hole. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Pregnant female geladas show an unusually high rate of miscarriage the day after the dominant male in their group is replaced by a new male, a new University of Michigan study indicates.
The “Bruce effect” – in which pregnant females spontaneously miscarry after being exposed to an unfamiliar male – has been found repeatedly in laboratory rodents. However, no conclusive evidence for this effect had ever been demonstrated in a wild population prior to this study. Geladas are Old World monkeys that are close relatives of baboons. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Using a liquid laser, University of Michigan researchers have developed a better way to detect the slight genetic mutations that might predispose a person to a particular type of cancer or other diseases.
Their results are published in the current edition of the German journal Angewandte Chemie. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Why is the universe magnetized? It’s a question scientists have been asking for decades. Now, an international team of researchers including a University of Michigan professor have demonstrated that it could have happened spontaneously, as the prevailing theory suggests.
The findings are published in the Jan. 26 edition of Nature. Oxford University scientists led the research. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A new University of Michigan computer model of disease transmission in space and time can predict cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh up to 11 months in advance, providing an early warning system that could help public health officials there.
The new forecast model applies specifically to the capital city of Dhaka and incorporates data on both year-to-year climate variability and the spatial location of cholera cases at the district level. This allowed the researchers to study both local variation in disease transmission and response to climate factors within the megacity of 14 million people. (more…)
University of Michigan visiting professor Stephen Bloom discusses how the Iowa Caucuses can change a presidential candidate’s campaign. – Written by Jared Wadley *Source: University of Michigan
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—They shook light from darkness. They coaxed something out of what we normally think of as nothing—the vacuum of space. And now their work has been named one of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year by Physics World, the international magazine announced today.
University of Michigan physics researcher Franco Nori is involved in the work, which was published in Nature in November.
The physicists directly observed, for the first time, light particles that flicker in and out of existence in the vacuum. They witnessed the long-predicted quantum mechanical phenomenon known as the dynamical Casimir effect. (more…)
