Sentiment has remained essentially unchanged since January 2024, continuing the plateau that followed the large gains seen at the end of 2023, according to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. The long-run business outlook lifted slightly to reach its highest reading since June 2021, while views of personal finances softened amid renewed discontent with high prices, said U-M economist Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers. Overall, consumers perceived few developments, positive or negative, in the state of the economy since the start of the new year. Joanne Hsu “For a th ..read more

National Public Radio’s Anastasia Tsioulcas has been named the inaugural Knight-Wallace Arts Journalism Fellow in a joint effort between the University of Michigan Arts Initiative and the Wallace House Center for Journalists. Tsioulcas is a correspondent on NPR’s Culture Desk and classical music critic at The New York Times—the first journalist to hold such a dual role. Her reporting focuses on music at the intersection of culture, politics, economics and identity. Previously at NPR Music, Tsioulcas curated episodes of the Tiny Desk concert series, hosted live events and created video shorts ..read more

Supporting independent travel for children, older adults and people with disabilities could give working women a break Study: Well-being implications of mobility of care: Gender differences among U.S. adults (DOI: 10.1016/j.trd.2024.104109) Caregiving travel—such as taking a child to school or a parent to the doctor—can be associated with stress and decreased happiness among women but not men, according to a University of Michigan study. The imbalance, the researchers say, is a reflection of how society—and transportation services and infrastructure—has historically valued travel for jobs mor ..read more

EXPERT Q&A Study: Arab American cognitive aging: Opportunities for advancing research on Alzheimer’s disease disparities Middle Eastern and Arab American populations may have higher rates of Alzheimer’s disease and related cognitive impairments, but researchers don’t exactly know because these populations aren’t identifiable in national datasets. That’s because historically, Middle Eastern and Arab Americans populations haven’t been included as a distinct ethnic group in the U.S. Census, making it difficult to include them in nationally representative studies. Recently, the U.S. Office of ..read more

EXPERT ADVISORY Social media app TikTok’s future in the United States is at risk after President Biden signed a bill that would force Chinese owner ByteDance to sell it. If that doesn’t happen, the app could be banned. University of Michigan experts are available to discuss this. Sarita Schoenebeck Sarita Schoenebeck, associate professor of information, can discuss social computing, human-computer interactions and social media. “The rush to regulate TikTok is misguided,” she said. “Focusing on a single company on what are, so far, ill-defined threats, misses the mark, and it also sets a concer ..read more

Four University of Michigan faculty members have been selected to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for their significant contributions in scholarly and professional fields. The academy has announced that James Joyce, Webb Keane, Alexandra Killewald and John Vandermeer—all affiliated with U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts—are among this year’s new members. “I am so honored to congratulate the distinguished members of our faculty on their election into this august institution,” said U-M President Santa J. Ono. “We’re so proud of their contributions to the Universit ..read more

Live webcast A new national effort to understand how active shooter drills may affect the health and well-being of K-12 students and school staff begins this week with the first meeting of a committee operating under the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Justin Heinze, associate professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, holds a seat on the newly created, 14-member committee made up of experts in firearms, education, campus and public safety, medicine, mental health, law and terrorism—all working on a consen ..read more

Scientists use 1.8 billion letters of genetic code to build groundbreaking tree of life Angiosperm Tree of Life. Image credit: RBG Kew Study: Phylogenomics and the rise of the Angiosperms (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07324-0) The most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life is presented in a new study published today in the journal Nature by an international team of 279 scientists, including three University of Michigan biologists. Using 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera (ca. 60%), this achieveme ..read more

An American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) in Calgary, Alberta. Most of today’s tree-dwelling mammals, such as red squirrels, originated after the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which devastated forests worldwide. A new study suggests that ground-dwelling and semi-arboreal mammals were better able to survive the event. Image credit: Daniel J. Field Study: A future food boom rescues the negative effects of early-life adversity on adult lifespan in a small mammal (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2023.2681) If a person has a high-quality, late-life environment, it can mitigate the negative impac ..read more

A slice of the mouse brainstem demonstrates the detection of morphine (green) and the expression of the SPOTIT sensor (magenta). Image credit: Noam Gannot and Peng Li, U-M Sciences Institute Study: Single-chain fluorescent integrators for mapping G-protein-coupled receptor agonists (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2307090121) University of Michigan researchers have developed a new tool to better understand how chemicals like dopamine and epinephrine interact with neurons. These chemicals are among a wide variety of signals that get processed in the brain through G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), proteins ..read more