ANN ARBOR — Sooner or later, everyone faces decisions about whether or not to have surgery, take a new medication or have a cancer-screening test.
A new University of Michigan study published in Health Expectations explores the costs and benefits patients say are important in making these kinds of medical decisions, and how those costs and benefits explain what they actually decide to do. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — A new University of Michigan analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty failed.
In the decade after Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty,” poverty rates plummeted to reach their historic low of about 11 percent in 1973. Poverty rates were 19 percent in 1964. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — The recent Arctic blast that gripped much of the nation will likely contribute to a healthy rise in Great Lakes water levels in 2014, new research shows. But the processes responsible for that welcome outcome are not as simple and straightforward as you might think.
Yes, extreme winter cold increases ice cover on the Great Lakes, which in turn reduces evaporation by preventing water vapor from escaping into the air. But this simplistic view of winter ice as a mere “cap” on Great Lakes evaporation is giving way to a more nuanced conception, one that considers the complex interplay among evaporation, ice cover and water temperature at different times of year. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — What started as a politically liberal Facebook meme in support of health care reform morphed as it spread across the social network into hundreds of thousands of variations—some just a few words from the original, but others centered on taxes, beer, or Star Wars’ villain Jabba the Hutt.
The twists on the original text over time in many ways mirrored the evolution of biological genes, researchers from the University of Michigan and Facebook have found. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — A comet-bound spacecraft that’s been in sleep mode for more than two years is scheduled to wake up on the morning of Jan. 20—beginning the home stretch of its decade-long journey to a mile-wide ball of rock, dust and ice.
If all goes as planned, Rosetta—a European Space Agency-led mission that involves University of Michigan engineers and scientists—will be the first craft to actually land on a comet as well as track it for an extended period of time. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — University of Michigan astronomers could be the first to witness a rare collision expected to happen at the center of the galaxy by spring.
With NASA’s orbiting Swift telescope, the U-M team is taking daily images of a mysterious gas cloud about three times the mass of Earth that’s spiraling toward the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s core. From our vantage point, the core lies more than 25,000 light years away in the southern summer sky near the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — Like salmon in reverse, long-snouted Bandringa sharks migrated downstream from freshwater swamps to a tropical coastline to spawn 310 million years ago, leaving behind fossil evidence of one of the earliest known shark nurseries.
That’s the surprising conclusion of University of Michigan paleontologist Lauren Sallan and a University of Chicago colleague, who reanalyzed all known specimens of Bandringa, a bottom-feeding predator that lived in an ancient river delta system that spanned what is today the Upper Midwest. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — A newly released white paper calls for new approaches for preserving scientific data and sustainable funding of domain repositories—data archives with ties to specific scientific communities.
“Sustaining Domain Repositories for Digital Data: A White Paper” is the result of a meeting last summer that brought together representatives of 22 data repositories serving the social, natural and physical sciences. The meeting at the University of Michigan was organized by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, part of the U-M Institute for Social Research. (more…)
