By relying on their vehicle’s batteries for more than just transportation, EV drivers could save thousands on their energy bills and cut carbon emissions

Using electric vehicles batteries to power households could save their owners thousands of dollars in bills while cutting emissions from the power grid, according to new research from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Company.

The team investigated scenarios related to vehicle-to-home charging, or V2H. This emerging technology lets EV drivers tap into energy from their vehicles’ batteries to help manage power to their homes. It’s almost like using EVs that are parked in garages as generators, but instead of burning gasoline, they provide electricity from their batteries that have been charged by the grid. The research is published in the journal Nature Energy.

“Putting vehicle batteries between the electricity grid and homes makes it possible for homes to buy electricity for all household uses when it is cheap and clean—for example, in the afternoon, when there is a lot of solar power—and to store it in the car’s battery for later use,” said Parth Vaishnav, an assistant professor in the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, or SEAS.

“If you’re buying an EV because you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions—or if you’re making an EV because you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions—this tells you that, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transport, the EV could also help cut building sector greenhouse gas emissions.”

According to the study, supported by the Ford-University of Michigan Alliance Program, V2H could save EV owners 40 to 90% of their charging costs over the lifetime of the vehicle. That translates to between $2,400 to $5,600 in vehicle lifetime savings.

Furthermore, V2H could reduce lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from a household’s electricity use by 70 to 250%, which would amount to cutting between 24 and 57 tons of lifetime carbon dioxide emissions. That’d be equivalent to driving a small gas-powered SUV for 80,000 to 190,000 miles, or 80 to 190 one-way flights between New York and Los Angeles. The reduction can surpass 100% when it more than makes up for emissions from the extra electricity needed to drive the car, Vaishnav said.

V2H in the U.S.A.

Vaishnav stressed that this idea is not new, but the discussion around V2H has been largely about its possibility and benefits in principle. What he and his colleagues have done is provided a more thorough and comprehensive outlook for the benefits of V2H in practice across the country.

The team evaluated the impact of V2H using a representative mid-sized SUV considering a variety of factors that vary by location. That included grid energy cost and emissions, housing stock and even the temperature outside, which affects energy efficiency. The team broke the contiguous U.S. into 432 regions defined by shared climates and grid conditions to map out the different impacts.

“We have a lot of geography-based insight,” said Jiahui Chen, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in SEAS. For instance, not all regions saw the same benefit.

But the research showed that V2H enabled greenhouse gas reductions that more than fully offset emissions from charging in regions that account for 60% of the U.S. population. In parts of Texas and California, the cost savings of V2H compared to conventional charging can be so great that it more than pays for the electricity needed for driving.

“When people think of EV charging, it’s usually thought of as a burden, a cost that is added to your electric bill,” Chen said. “But, with this kind of technology integration, we can make charging an asset.”

A work in progress

While the study’s take-home message is that V2H has serious economic and environmental upside, the team also stressed that there are important caveats to consider. One way of looking at the study is that it provides decision-makers with an estimate of whether equipping homes for V2H is worth it, Vaishnav said.

“Another important factor is that the technology to control charging and maximize V2H isn’t fully plug-and-play in the U.S. yet, but it is actively being demonstrated with local utilities in various U.S. markets” said Hyung Chul Kim, a research scientist at Ford and a coauthor of the new study.

“This capability is promising but still in its early stages. We’re working with utilities to identify the best use cases for them, and we’re also determining ways to optimize overall battery lifetime.”

Solutions have been developed and are being tested to deliver on that optimization with utilities and customers.

“Ultimately, the goal is that drivers won’t have to change anything—they would park and plug in their EVs as normal, then technology running in the background automatically finds the best charging and discharging times,” Kim said.

While that infrastructure begins to scale, the team hopes its collaboration can also lead to a more immediate shift in the way people think about energy and their vehicles.

“We know that vehicles are parked the vast majority of the time and, so as this infrastructure develops, there’s a great opportunity here,” said Robb De Kleine, a life cycle research analyst with Ford and a coauthor of the new study.

“As we try to decarbonize the grid, we need energy storage to be able to do that. A lot of the time, the first instinct is to build stationary storage. But EVs could serve as electricity storage devices,” De Kleine said. “They just happen to have wheels on them.”

The research team also included James Anderson, a technical leader of sustainability and environmental science at Ford, and Greg Keoleian, a professor with SEAS. The team also published a corresponding policy brief about the work.

Guo is recognized for advances in nanoscale lithography, transparent conductors and structural color

L. Jay Guo, the Emmett Leith Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been elected to the National Academy of Inventors for playing a crucial role in enabling the next generation of flexible electronics and technologies that harness light.

He has made multitude contributions to technology development. One is a scalable way of making small structures by nanopatterning. Rather than using conventional lithography, which burns away parts of polymer coating on chips using light, his group focused on a method that resembles printing, with flexible base materials wound onto rolls. Known as roll-to-roll nanoimprint technology, it made nanopatterning easier to scale up for factory manufacturing.

From this technological base, he and his industrial partners have used nanopatterning to create flexible displays, touchscreens and lighting as well as structural color, which uses the optical phenomena that produce color in butterfly wings rather than conventional pigments. His work has attracted the interest from companies such as Samsung and Toyota, and he has also co-founded two startup companies using simpler thin film manufacturing technologies, both launched in 2018.

“Dr. Guo is an outstanding scholar and inventor in the field of nanotechnology and manufacturing. He made extraordinary technical contributions through innovation and invention, which have made significant economic and societal impacts in the past twenty-five years,” Zhenqiang Ma, the Lynn H. Matthias Professor in Engineering and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in his nomination letter.

One of Guo’s startups, Zenith Nano, offers a range of products including flexible, transparent conductors for touch screens, electrochromic windows that change their transparency on demand, and flexible solar cells. The other, InLight technologies, is led by his former PhD student. It offers structural color for automobile coatings, cosmetic products and colored solar panels.

Now, Guo is developing an approach that can mimic chrome coatings, potentially achieving a popular look without the need to process a toxic form of the metal chromium. His research group is also using AI to help design these advanced optical coatings.

“I have long had a conviction that the ultimate success of engineering research is to deploy in the real world,” Guo said. “It is an honor to have these efforts recognized by the National Academy of Inventors.”

Guo is also a professor of applied physics, mechanical engineering, and currently serves as the director of macromolecular science and engineering.

A new study challenges convention and suggests that there are a large number of galaxies, especially small ones, without black holes at their cores. This could shed more light on how big black holes came to exist.

This finding, led by researchers at the University of Michigan using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, is at odds with the prevailing astronomical notion that nearly every massive galaxy has one of these giant black holes at its core.

The team, made up of researchers from more than a dozen institutions around the world, used data from more than 1,600 galaxies collected over 20-plus years of the federally-funded Chandra mission. The size of the galaxies ranged from more than 10 times the mass of the Milky Way down to dwarf galaxies, which have masses less than a few percent of our home galaxy.

The team’s analysis showed that only about 30% of dwarf galaxies likely contain supermassive black holes. Black holes were far more common in massive galaxies, such as the Milky Way, being present in more than 90%. The team published its findings in The Astrophysical Journal.

“It’s more than just bookkeeping,” said Fan Zou, a postdoctoral researcher in the U-M Department of Astronomy who led the study. “Our study gives clues about how supermassive black holes are born. It also provides crucial hints about how often black hole signatures in dwarf galaxies can be found with new or future telescopes.”

What’s going on in small galaxies is of particular interest because they’re more reflective of what the universe was like longer ago, Zou said.

“It’s important to get an accurate black hole head count in these smaller galaxies,” Zou said. “With low mass galaxies, we expect that they haven’t changed much since they were born, so they’re kind of like fossils from the early universe. By looking at low-mass galaxies and black holes, we can learn more about what was happening in the early universe.”

“The formation of big black holes is expected to be rarer, in the sense that it occurs preferentially in the most massive galaxies being formed, so that would explain why we don’t find black holes in all the smaller galaxies,” said Anil Seth, a coauthor and a professor at University of Utah.

There are currently two main theories about how supermassive black holes form. One is that they grow from smaller black holes, created when giant stars run out of fuel and collapse. The second idea is that the giant black holes are born big from the collapse of enormous gas clouds so that they have the mass of thousands of suns to begin with. The team’s findings suggest the latter is more likely.

The case of the missing X-rays

As material falls onto black holes, it is heated by friction and produces X-rays. Many of the massive galaxies in the study contain bright X-ray sources in their centers, a clear signature of supermassive black holes. But the study’s smaller galaxies—galaxies with masses less than 3 billion suns—usually lacked these unambiguous black hole signals (for comparison, the Milky Way has a mass of around 60 billion suns).

The researchers considered two possible explanations for this lack of X-ray sources. The first is that the fraction of galaxies containing massive black holes is much lower for these less massive galaxies. The second is that the amount of X-rays produced by matter falling onto these black holes is so faint that Chandra cannot detect it.

“We think, based on our analysis of the Chandra data, that there really are fewer black holes in these smaller galaxies than in their larger counterparts,” said Elena Gallo, a coauthor and U-M professor of astronomy.

Gallo and her colleagues were able to consider both possibilities for the lack of X-ray sources in small galaxies in their large Chandra sample. The amount of gas falling onto a black hole determines how bright or faint they are in X-rays. Because smaller black holes are expected to pull in less gas than larger black holes, they should be fainter in X-rays and often not detectable. The researchers confirmed this expectation.

They also found, however, that this explanation alone could not account for the entire deficit of X-ray sources. That is, there was an additional deficit beyond what was expected. And this additional deficit could be accounted for if many of the low mass galaxies simply don’t have any black holes at their centers.

“Our analysis, statistically, is able to tell us that the likelihood is much higher that the black holes aren’t there,” Gallo said.

Gallo and Zou said the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency that’s being developed to launch in 2035, will be able to further test their conclusions. With NASA’s funding outlook murky at the moment, though, it remains to be seen how the agency will continue the legacy of large, flagship missions like Chandra, the Hubble Space Telescope and the JWST.

“These machines, these products of human ingenuity, have really given us an understanding of the universe and our place in it,” Gallo said. “These great missions have delivered enormous knowledge and this study is one tiny piece of that.”

Findings suggest future vaccines use natural antibodies to target both infection and spread

Today’s influenza vaccines primarily prevent infection in individuals, but new research led by the University of Michigan and the Institut Pasteur suggests that incorporating antibodies generated after infection could lead to more powerful vaccines by also reducing person-to-person transmission.

Future vaccines that boost the antibodies – neuraminidase, or NA, in particular, along with, HA head and HA stalk (HA stands for hemagglutinin) – may add an important layer of community protection, the researchers say.

“NA is a part of the influenza virus that has been relatively overlooked in vaccine design yet they play a key role not only in lowering infection risk but also in reducing how contagious someone becomes when infected,” said Aubree Gordon, co-senior study author and director of the Michigan Center for Infectious Disease Threats and Pandemic Preparedness.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications and was funded by the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. It comes amid warnings of a severe flu season ahead and as the first deaths of the 2025-2026 flu season are being recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Influenza infects upwards of one billion people and leads to some 650,000 deaths globally each year. Lost productivity and hospitalizations due to the flu also result in major economic loss and burden.

“Modifying vaccines to include NA antibodies provides an extra layer of defense that’s especially important for infants, immunocompromised individuals and others who can’t mount strong vaccine responses,” Gordon, an epidemiologist from the School of Public Health said. “This could also be very important if we were to have an influenza pandemic.”

She helped lead a multinational research team that followed 171 Nicaraguan households and their 664 contacts over three influenza seasons – 2014, 2016, 2017. Almost all of the participants had never been vaccinated, allowing researchers to observe transmission patterns driven primarily by antibodies from infection.

Through bloodwork, virologic testing and the power of mathematical modeling, the researchers identified which antibodies were most effective at limiting spread.

Simon Cauchemez, epidemiologist and infectious disease modeller from Institut Pasteur and its Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases Unit, is senior co-author with Gordon and said the detailed household data and modeling methods let the researchers chart and document how the antibodies reacted and which were most powerful in keeping an infected person from spreading the flu to people they came into contact with.

“Understanding which factors drive the spread of influenza is essential to design more effective control strategies but often challenging. Here, we were able to obtain such insight thanks to the analysis of very detailed data documenting influenza transmission in households with state-of-the-art modelling techniques,” Cauchemez said.

Very few people in the study were vaccinated, giving the researchers watch how immunity, primarily from prior infection, impacts the chances you’ll get influenza and whether you spread it to others. It’s an important distinction because people who get influenza can be strongly protected against that same type of influenza for many years while vaccines to influenza tend to provide moderate protection for less than a year.

“By studying immunity after infection,” the authors wrote, “we can identify which antibody responses are most protective and translate those insights into improved vaccine designs that provide stronger and longer-lasting protection.”

Study co-authors: Gregory Hoy, University of Michigan Medical School and School of Public Health; Thomas Cortier, Institut Pasteur and Sorbonne Universite; Hannah E. Maier and Abigail Shotwell, U-M School of Public Health; Guillermina Kuan, Sustainable Sciences Institute and Centro de Salud Sócrates Flores Vivas, Ministry of Health, both in Managua, Nicaragua; Roger Lopez and Angel Balmaseda, Sustainable Sciences Institute, Managua, Nicaragua and Laboratorio Nacional de Virología, Centro, Nacional de Diagnóstico y Referencia, Ministry of Health, Managua, Nicaragua; Nery Sanchez, Sergio Ojeda and Miguel Plazaola, Sustainable Sciences Institute, Managua, Nicaragua; Daniel Stadlbauer, Icahn School of Medicine; Florian Krammer, Icahn School of Medicine, Center for Vaccine Research and Pandemic Preparedness, and Ignaz Semmelweis Institute.

Depression has been traditionally treated globally as a disorder of brain chemistry. But what if the immune system is pulling more strings than we ever realized?

A new University of Michigan and Harvard University systematic review and meta-analysis finds that anti-inflammatory treatments not only reduce depressive symptoms, but also anhedonia—the inability to feel pleasure—in people with both depression and high levels of inflammation. 

“This is an important finding that has the potential to make the emerging field of immunopsychiatry more relevant,” said the study’s co-first author Annelise Madison, assistant professor of clinical psychology and affiliate member in the U-M Eisenberg Family Depression Center.

Immunopsychiatry explores how the immune system and mental health are connected.

The federally funded research, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, could open doors for personalized treatments, as well as help people who haven’t found relief from standard antidepressant therapies, the researchers say.

The systematic review included 19 studies, but the meta-analysis included 14.

Researchers reviewed 19 clinical trials where people with depression and high inflammation were treated with various anti-inflammatory drugs against placebos lasting up to 12 weeks. The anti-inflammatory treatments eased both depression and loss of pleasure in people with high levels of inflammation. The findings also showed no increase in serious side effects. 

Regarding the possibility of new anti-inflammatory drugs being developed for depression, she said their use in psychiatry is off-label because the FDA has not approved them to treat depression.

Overall, this meta-analysis, according to Madison, may help to explain why there were prior mixed findings in terms of anti-inflammatory treatment efficacy for depression. 

“That is, without focusing on the inflammatory phenotype when recruiting participants, the trial may fail to find effects among a heterogeneous depression sample,” she said.

The researchers included co-first author Naoise Mac Giollabhui, Melis Lydston, and Richard Liu of Harvard Medical School; Emma Quang of Harvard University; and Andrew Miller of Emory University.

The work was supported by National Institute for Mental Health grants K23MH132893, R01 MH115905, R01 MH124899, R21 MH130767; R01MH137793, K24 MH136418, a L.I.F.E. Foundation Research Grant, Harvard University’s Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, and Massachusetts’s General Hospital Translational Clinical Research Center’s Early Career Investigator Award

As the U.S. birth rate reaches historic lows in 2025, these declines fuel economic change as the year comes to an end.

A University of Michigan study showed that low U.S. fertility has led to gains in pay equity. Eight percent of the narrowing gender pay gap came from women having fewer children.

The findings arrive amid a growing pronatalist push from policymakers and public figures urging the country to reverse its fertility decline.

“Increasing birth rates will tend to widen the pay gap, unless we find ways to reduce the motherhood wage penalty,” said Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald, research professor at the Institute for Social Research.

Why did this decline happen?

By delaying or forgoing children, women secured continuous, high-skill employment, a structural shift with massive economic implications for future generations.

“The U.S. has made progress toward equal pay for men and women: in the mid-1980s, women only made 65% as much as men for every hour of paid work. Today, it’s about 85%,” sociologist Killewald said. “On the other hand, we still haven’t reached pay equality for men and women.”

Having kids affects men’s and women’s earnings differently, according to a study published in Social Forces and partly supported by the National Institutes of Health. Typically, when women become mothers, their wages drop—especially with each additional child. For men, becoming fathers actually boosts their earnings.

“When we think about the gender pay gap, we often think about how men and women differ in the characteristics employers care about, such as their education, field of study, work experience, occupation, and so on. And those factors are all important,” Killewald said. “But our findings remind us that the work-related characteristics don’t occur in a vacuum: the way men and women experience parenthood and women’s greater responsibility for caregiving shape their work lives, affecting their wages.”

The study looked at a large national dataset on American workers’ family sizes and earnings over time. They found that in the 1980s, working Americans had on average 2.4 kids; by 2000, this dropped to 1.8—the most recent year in their analysis—and it’s been steady since. As family sizes shrank, the gender pay gap became smaller.

It also found that motherhood is associated with wage losses for women in large part because mothers often take time out of the labor force or work part-time rather than full-time.

“Public investments in high-quality, affordable child care could allow more mothers to work for pay or to work more hours, if they want to,” Killewald said. “It’s also important to think about policies that would help dads share caregiving more equally with moms. In the U.S., long work hours are standard, making it hard for couples to maintain two careers while raising children. Policies that limit mandatory overtime or reduce the standard work week could help.”

There are multiple goals in considering family policies, according to the author.

“We want individuals to be able to have the number of children they want on the timeline they want, to support their children financially and to have time to care for them,” Killewald said. “We want men and women to have equal opportunities to work and parent in the ways they prefer. So, we may support policies that advance some of these goals, even if they don’t advance others.”

Study also shows long-term effects not limited to COVID-19

EXPERT Q&A

Recovering from respiratory syncytial virus often doesn’t end when it’s time to leave the hospital, even for younger adults.

For months after discharge, a new study led by a University of Michigan researcher found that adults young and old often live with profound effects such as lingering breathlessness, difficulty performing daily activities and more.

The study showed it’s not just the very young and elderly hit hard by RSV and left unwell for as long as a year after infection. While adults over age 65 make up the largest proportion of RSV deaths followed by young children, all ages are at risk of serious RSV.

The toll that RSV, an infection that can be prevented or made less severe with vaccination, is detailed in a study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, the peer-reviewed, weekly journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Aleda Leis, a research assistant professor in epidemiology at the U-M School of Public Health, led the study that was funded by CDC. Leis explains more:

What were the most surprising or significant findings about the physical and mental health of RSV survivors after hospitalization?

Overall, we found that many patients hospitalized with RSV had poor physical functioning, functional impairment and persistent symptoms including shortness of breath six to 12 months after their hospitalization—regardless of age.

One of our most surprising findings was that many patients hospitalized with RSV were younger than 60 years old. RSV is generally thought to cause severe illness primarily in very young children and older adults, but our study shows that younger adults can also experience serious RSV infections requiring hospitalization.

Interestingly, we found very few significant differences in our long-term outcomes between those respondents younger than 60 and those 60 years and older. One of our biggest findings was that older adults had higher odds of losing at least one independent activity of daily living compared to before their illness than those under 60.

On the other hand, we found that younger adults had higher odds of more significant sleep disturbances compared to older adults. We’re hoping to dig more into the causes of some of these effects in future research.

Why study the long-term outcomes in adults hospitalized with RSV?

The COVID-19 pandemic really brought the possibility of long-term outcomes following viral illness into the spotlight. While long COVID has received significant attention, lasting effects can happen after illness with other acute respiratory viruses, including RSV.

Since there are limited treatment options for RSV, it’s important to understand the potential long-term outcomes of severe RSV infection so that clinicians and public health workers can identify who might benefit from additional follow-up after illness. This information can also help inform efforts to prevent disease or reduce severity, such as through vaccination, which is now available to certain groups of adults.

How is this research different from previous work on RSV?

Our research differs from previous work on RSV in a few key areas. First, while most studies have focused on adults over 60 years of age, our study includes those 18 years and older hospitalized with RSV. Additionally, our follow-up period is longer than that of most other studies, including outcomes six to 12 months after their acute illness. We also offered surveys in both English and Spanish, and our participants came from a large nationwide cohort of adults with severe acute respiratory infection. Combined, these strengths allowed us to gain a more generalizable understanding of longer-term outcomes after severe RSV in adults.

How did the long-term effects of RSV compare to those seen in adults hospitalized for COVID-19? Are there important similarities or differences?

We found that those hospitalized with RSV reported similar outcomes to those hospitalized with COVID-19. In both situations, there was moderately low physical functioning and quality of life. The notable exception is dyspnea, or shortness of breath. Those with RSV had almost two times higher odds of more severe dyspnea six to 12 months after their hospitalization than those with COVID-19.

What do you want people to learn from this study?

We hope the takeaway from our study is that long-term effects can happen after respiratory illnesses other than COVID-19, too. For those with RSV, these long-term effects appeared similar to those after COVID-19, and younger adults with RSV had similar long-term outcomes to older adults. We hope that this study can help provide more information about the risks of RSV in adults beyond the acute infection phase and the potential benefits of RSV prevention such as vaccination.

To end the Colorado River Basin’s megadrought, ‘we just need to stop climate change,’ U-M expert says. ‘We know how to stop it and it’s not too late to stop it.’

The Colorado River Basin, like much of the southwestern U.S., is experiencing a drought so historic—it began in 1999—that it’s been called a megadrought. In the basin, whose river provides water to seven states and Mexico, that drought is the product of warming temperatures and reduced precipitation, especially in the form of winter snow.

While the warming trend has been conclusively linked to the human activities driving climate change, the cause of the waning precipitation wasn’t as clear. Now, however, Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Michigan and Brad Udall of the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University are convinced that anthropogenic climate change is the culprit as well.

“The drought’s been going on for over 25 years and there’s been a real downward trend in precipitation. But, even as recently as a year ago, we thought that just might be part of the natural variability—we figured the precipitation might turn around,” said Overpeck, the dean of the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability. “Within the last year, there’s been research that tells us pretty convincingly that’s not the case. Longterm, there are going to be more dry winters than wet winters and that’s due to climate change.”

Starting with a cornerstone 2017 study, Udall and Overpeck have been detailing the state of the drought and its climate drivers with a series of graphs that use the best data and science available. In this year’s update to the graphs, published as part of a larger annual report just released by the Colorado River Research Group, the duo came to two conclusions. One, the downward precipitation trend is also due to human activity and, two, it’s unlikely to rebound until we do something about it.

“Because we understand the cause of the decline in precipitation and the increase in temperature, we know how to stop it. We just have to stop climate change. No big deal, right?” Overpeck said. “But we know how to stop it, we have the solutions, and it’s not too late to stop it.”

The duo said that having an extra year of data helped reach these conclusions, but the key development was the publication of two new studies in the field of climate science. One study, led by Jeremy Klavans of the University of Colorado, Boulder, helped improve climate models used to study the region. The second study, led by Victoria Todd of the University of Texas at Austin, used paleoclimatology techniques to reveal trends in temperatures from thousands of years ago to provide critical context for the current scenario.

Taken together, this led Udall and Overpeck to issue a reality check as the title for their contribution to the annual Colorado River Basin report: “Think Natural Flows Will Rebound in the Colorado River Basin? Think Again.” To comfortably provide adequate water for the basin, the natural flow of the Colorado River should be at 16.5 million acre-feet, roughly the volume of 8 million Olympic sized pools, Overpeck said. It is currently closer to 12 million acre-feet.

Both Udall and Overpeck stressed there is natural variability and there will be wetter winters and dryer winters year to year. Their findings point to the long-term outlook being dryer overall, however. That said, the near-term outlook isn’t great either, Udall said.

“We’ve basically taken the buffer out of the system. We’ve burned through all this reservoir storage over the past 26 years and we’re one dry winter away from having very serious water usage cuts being enforced in a way that has never occurred before,” Udall said. “And this winter is not starting off on a good foot.”

People often ask Udall what happens if we don’t limit greenhouse gas emissions and the warming of the average global temperature to international targets, like those set by the Paris Agreement. This precarious situation is one of the answers. While farmers and water managers in the region are acutely aware of the stakes, he said, the climate-water connection is of global importance. Droughts are enabling more devastating wildfires, while storms are carrying more water leading to more dangerous floods.

“This supercharging of the hydrological cycle is the story of climate change, in my mind. Climate change is water change,” Udall said. “We control our own destiny here, but we’re not controlling it right now.”

EXPERT Q&A

A University of Michigan health expert weighs in on a recent recommendation by a national advisory committee to drop the universal hepatitis B vaccine requirement for newborns that is raising many questions and stirring debate.

Anand Parekh, chief health policy officer at the U-M School of Public Health, said the policy, begun in 1991, is seen as one of the country’s top public health achievements after leading to a 99 percent decrease in cases among infants and children, preventing lifelong illness, liver disease and liver cancer.

Parekh spent a decade with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service, serving as deputy assistant secretary for health in the Senior Executive Service and chief medical advisor for the Bipartisan Policy Center, among other federal public health roles. He is available for interviews.

Here are some of his insights on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice’s recommendations, which he said the CDC is expected to accept.

How does this differ from long-established vaccination strategy?

For several decades, the ACIP has recommended universal hepatitis B vaccination within 24 hours of birth, followed by completion of the vaccine series to prevent infant infection which can lead to chronic hepatitis B and liver disease. The birth dose prevents perinatal transmission due to a lack of testing or failures in reporting test results. It also provides protection to infants at risk from household exposure after the perinatal period.

This updated recommendation, made by a newly constituted ACIP with many members who lack a background in infectious diseases and immunization, moves away from universal vaccination and encourages individual decision-making for parents deciding whether to give the hepatitis B vaccine, including the birth dose, to infants born to women who test negative for the virus.

History has taught us that a universal vaccination strategy has been associated with dramatically reduced cases of chronic hepatitis B infections among young people. The recent ACIP recommendation did not include any new data uncovering risks of the vaccine and seemingly ignored the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence in favor of universal vaccination.

Does this fuel vaccine hesitancy, skepticism?

ACIP’s recommendation will undoubtedly create confusion amongst the public. It will also substantially increase the need for patient education about the importance of the hepatitis B vaccine series to prevent infection and chronic liver disease in children.

How does this affect physicians, healthcare providers, public health representatives?

Changes to recommendations that are not based on new scientific evidence and data place clinicians and public health officials in a difficult situation when speaking to patients and the public, respectively. The tragic irony is that while current health policy leaders have the goal of reversing the children’s chronic disease epidemic, this recommendation would increase the risk for chronic liver disease in children.

More specifically, what are your thoughts on ACIP’s recommendation that parents request antibody testing after vaccination?

ACIP’s recommendation that parents request clinicians obtain blood antibody levels after the first vaccine dose to determine whether additional shots are needed is concerning. It shifts responsibility to parents and may lead to missing the vaccine or not being fully protected. This recommendation is also not supported by evidence. Rather, data continues to demonstrate that the full three-dose vaccination series produces robust, long-term protection from hepatitis B infection. While one would hope that the CDC will reject the ACIP’s recommendation, this is unlikely to occur. The bottom line is that individuals should turn to their personal clinician if they have any questions about the hepatitis B vaccine.

Young Americans use nicotine, tobacco and cannabis in multiple ways, but smoking those items––the most dangerous method––is still involved for most users, a new University of Michigan study found.

The research, funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, is important because using any type of nicotine, tobacco or cannabis product is harmful to young people, says lead investigator Rebecca Evans-Polce, U-M research associate professor of nursing. Understanding the types of products they use most, and if and how they’re used together, can help develop better interventions, she says.

The study used 2022–23 data from 8,722 individuals aged 12-34 in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health study who reported using nicotine, tobacco or cannabis in the past 30 days. Researchers found that users averaged about two products in that period, and classified users into six distinct user subgroups: combustible tobacco, 31%; multiple forms of cannabis, 27%; vaping nicotine, 18%; multiple forms and co-use of nicotine, tobacco and cannabis, 14%; cannabis edibles, 5%; multiple forms and co-use of nicotine and tobacco, 5%.

Majority are still smoking tobacco

The largest subgroup was combustible tobacco, and several other large subgroups still reported using combustible products, which are typically the most harmful.

“This is really important because there are known harms associated with using combustible products, especially combustible tobacco,” Evans-Polce said. “Among those that used, combustible tobacco use and cannabis smoking remain some of the most predominant forms of use. And about 1 in 7 were using combustible tobacco and combustible cannabis. While cigarette use continues to decline overall, which is great, this shows this is still an important public health issue and we need to continue to put resources to smoking cessation efforts for young people.”

Also concerning is the group that co-used multiple forms of nicotine, tobacco and cannabis.

“They reported using a lot of different types of nicotine and tobacco and a lot of types of cannabis,” Evans-Polce said. “We know that using multiple types exposes you to higher levels of carcinogens and toxins and can make it much harder to quit using.”

Sex differences have diminished

“That we didn’t see more differences in males and females is notable,” Evans-Polce said. “The most recent research findings show generally that sex differences in alcohol and drug use have diminished,and in some cases disappeared among many age groups. So, this fits with this trend and suggests that females are now at just as high a risk for high risk patterns of cannabis and tobacco use as males.”

Young people in general are still in need of cessation and prevention resources, particularly young adults, she said. Researchers also found higher combustible tobacco among males and Black and African American youth, suggesting prevention and cessation treatment resources may be important for these populations.

Continued surveillance is critical

Evans-Polce said continued surveillance, especially of new product forms and regulations, is key.

“It is important to know what types of products are being used, especially among youth, so that our interventions are addressing these latest trends and are relevant to young people,” she said.

Further research may include examining how different regulatory environments impact these use patterns and if there are increases in these newer and less traditional forms of use among youth.

Co-authors include: Jessica Mongilio, Sean Esteban McCabe and Phil Veliz, all of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking, and Health, at the U-M School of Nursing.

The findings—and how they were made—could be used to help assess fatigue, develop therapeutics and address mental health issues

An international team led by the University of Michigan has introduced new methods that reveal which regions of the brain were active throughout the day with single-cell resolution.

Using mouse models, the researchers developed an experimental protocol and a computational analysis to follow which neurons and networks within the brain were active at different times. Published in the journal PLOS Biology, the study provides new insights into brain signaling during sleep and wakefulness, which hints at the bigger questions and goals that motivated the work.

“We undertook this difficult study to understand fatigue,” said senior author Daniel Forger, U-M professor of mathematics. “We’re seeing profound changes in the brain over the course of the day as we stay awake and they seem to be corrected as we go to sleep.”

What the team found and how they found it could help lead to new ways to objectively assess fatigue in humans. These could in turn be used to help ensure people with high-stakes responsibilities, such as pilots and surgeons, are adequately rested before starting a flight or an operation.

“We’re actually terrible judges of our own fatigue. It’s based on our subjective tiredness,” Forger said. “Our hope is that we can develop ‘signatures’ that will tell us if people are particularly fatigued, and whether they can do their jobs safely.”

The study was supported by federal funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office. It also received funding from the Human Frontier Science Program, or HFSP, that enables pioneering work in the life sciences through international collaboration, which was key to this study.

A more global view

While researchers at U-M created the mathematical and computational workflows to analyze and interpret data, collaborators in Japan and Switzerland were developing a powerful new experimental approach.

They leveraged a cutting-edge form of imaging called light sheet microscopy that enabled them to generate 3D images of mouse brains. They also introduced a genetic tagging method that resulted in active neurons glowing under the microscope, allowing the researchers to see which cells were active across the brain and when.

“We know from studies over the last 20 or 30 years, how to decipher how one aspect—a gene or a type of neuron, for instance—can contribute to behavior,” said Konstantinos Kompotis, a study co-author and senior scientist at the Human Sleep Psychopharmacology Laboratory at the University of Zurich. “But we also know that whatever governs our behavior, it’s not just one gene or one neuron or one structure within the brain. It’s everything and how it connects and interacts at a given time.”

The HSFP brought together teams across three countries to investigate those connections and interactions more deeply. That included the U-M team, the Zurich team and a Japanese team, led by Hiroki Ueda of the Laboratory for Synthetic Biology at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems and Dynamics Research.

Working together, the team saw that, generally speaking, as mice wake up, activity starts in inner, or subcortical, layers of the brain. As the mice progressed throughout their day—or night, rather (they are nocturnal)—hubs of activity moved to the cortex at the brain’s surface.

“The brain doesn’t just change how active it is throughout the day or during a specific behavior,” Kompotis said. “It actually reorganizes which networks or communicating regions are in charge, much like a city’s roads serve different traffic networks at different times.”

This finding, and how it was made, provides foundational steps toward identifying signatures of fatigue and more, Forger said. For example, he also suspects that exploring this general pattern further could yield ties to mental health.

“This study doesn’t touch on that,” Forger said. “But I do think the activity we saw in different regions is going to be important for understanding certain psychiatric disorders.”

Furthermore, Kompotis has already started working with industrial partners to use the team’s experimental techniques to probe how different therapeutics and drug candidates affect brain activity.

Although the new experimental techniques are not applicable to humans, researchers can translate certain findings from mouse models to human physiology, Forger said. And the computational approaches developed for this study are generalizable, said co-author Guanhua Sun. Sun worked on this project as a doctoral student at U-M and is now a Courant Lecturer at New York University.

“The mathematics behind this problem are actually quite simple,” Sun said.

That simple math enabled the team to combine their new data with existing data sets on mouse brains. The challenge, Sun said, was making sure that how they combined that data was done in a manner that was consistent with biology and neurology. So long as that standard is upheld, the team’s computational approach could be applied to human data gleaned from EEG, PET and MRI scans, he said.

“The way we detect human brain activity is more coarse-grained than what we see in our study,” Sun said. “But the method we introduced in this paper can be modified in a way that applies to that human data. You could also adapt it for other animal models, for example, that are being used to study Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. I would say it’s quite transferable.”

On a more personal note, the team dedicated this study to Steven Brown, a colleague who died in a plane crash during the project.

“Steve was a perfect collaborator,” Forger said.

Brown is a senior co-author on the new study and was a professor and section leader for chronobiology and sleep research at the University of Zurich.

“We learned how important one person can be in scientific research, be it in brainstorming or in bridging ideas and concepts. Steve was a core element of this collaboration,” Kompotis said. “It is yet another reason for us to be very proud of this story.”

New machine learning model draws data from wearable sensors to predict how a physical therapist would assess balance training performance

Balance training patients may soon be able to get AI feedback during home exercises, with four wearable sensors and a new machine learning model developed at the University of Michigan.

The team hopes their technology could help patients make faster progress during physical therapy and maintain their abilities after the end of their prescribed sessions. It could also help physical therapists to make health care decisions.

“Our machine learning model used data from wearable sensors to predict how physical therapists would rate patients’ performance on balance exercises, providing a basis to make recommendations about the most appropriate set of exercises to perform next. This type of AI-based support would be helpful in between appointments or after people complete their insurance-reimbursed sessions with a clinician,” said Kathleen Sienko, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of mechanical engineering at U-M and senior author of the study in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

The model was built from sensor data combined with analysis from physical therapists, and its development was funded by the National Science Foundation and U-M AI & Digital Health Innovation.

Balance training helps reduce the risk of falls, helping older adults and those with sensory and motor impairments live independent lives for longer. Typically, physical therapists assess the amount of difficulty patients experience while balancing by observing them during in-clinic sessions. The next exercise they suggest must be sufficiently challenging—balance improvements only happen when the neuromuscular system is pushed beyond current abilities—while keeping the patient safe.

In addition to supporting the care of patients with local access to physical therapists, the researchers are also exploring the possibility of providing rural patients with remote care, lifting the burden of long drives while keeping a clinician in the loop.

“Understanding what the patient and the therapist need has to be part of the algorithms we put together. I’m excited to merge different types of data to create a decision support system for both parties,” said study co-author Leia Stirling, U-M professor of industrial and operations engineering and robotics.

To build the model, researchers filmed participants doing standing balance exercises at various levels of difficulty while wearing 13 sensors attached with velcro straps. The sensors, called inertial measurement units, measure acceleration and rotational motion to detect sway and movements of the major body segments.

Physical therapist study participants watched the videos to evaluate how hard the balancing participants were working on a scale from 1 to 5 for each exercise.

Using the sensor data, the research team trained convolutional neural networks—a class of machine learning models that learn spatial features from image data—to predict balance difficulty. Then, they compared the machine learning model’s prediction with the physical therapists’ average score for each balance participant.

The team’s model predicted patients’ balance ratings with nearly 90% accuracy, which is within a point of expert ratings on the same scale. While the study tested 13 sensors, a sensitivity analysis found just four sensors—placed on each thigh, the low back and upper back—were sufficient to maintain model performance.

“It is very important to understand both the strengths and potential failure modes of machine learning in physical therapy, where people’s well-being is directly at stake. For example, an overfitted model may perform poorly with new patients, leading to mispredictions and unsafe exercise recommendations. To protect patients, these systems should be validated on real-world data and used with therapist oversight so unexpected or risky suggestions can be caught before harm,” said study co-author Xun Huan, U-M associate professor of mechanical engineering.

In a second, related study published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, physical therapists wore eye tracking glasses and provided explanations of their assessments while the participants performed these standing balance exercises. Analyzing where physical therapists focus attention as exercises become more difficult helped researchers understand their decision-making process.

“It was interesting to see how complicated the physical therapists’ balance assessments are and to consider how best to capture the factors they consider in our models,” said Emma Nigrelli, U-M doctoral student of mechanical engineering and lead author of the eye tracking study.

Moving forward, the team hopes to contribute the technical grounding and background for machine-learning-assisted balance training technology to be widely available.

“In some regions, access to physical therapists specializing in balance rehabilitation may not be possible,” Sienko said. “I was excited by the possibility of developing something that could expand access to services like balance training—not only for people in rural areas across the U.S. who may lack regular access to physical therapists, but also for individuals globally.”

Safa Jabri, Jeremiah Hauth, Lauro Ojeda and Jenna Wiens of the U-M College of Engineering and Wendy Carender of the Michigan Medicine Department of Otolaryngology also contributed to this research.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (CMMI-2125256; 2125256) and the University of Michigan.

The team is seeking partners to bring the technology to market.

U-M technology is helping astronomers open new windows into novae, stellar explosions that can act as ‘laboratories for extreme physics’

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the University of Michigan, has captured unprecedented images of two stellar explosions—known as novae—within days of their eruption.

Catching these novae so early in the act provides new evidence that such explosions are more complex than previously thought.

The study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, used a technique called interferometry at the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy, or CHARA, Array in California. This approach allowed scientists to combine the light from multiple telescopes, achieving the sharp resolution needed to directly image the rapidly evolving explosions.

“These aren’t the first novae to be imaged, but there haven’t been very many,” said John Monnier, a co-author of the new study and U-M professor of astronomy. “We’re showing that we’re getting better at taking these images and making it easier to do so.”

The study was funded by NASA, and the CHARA Array was created with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Instruments used on the study—namely, the MIRC-X and MYSTIC beam combiners—were also created with support from the NSF and the European Research Council in collaboration with the University of Exeter.

Novae occur in systems with two large celestial bodies: a “regular” star and a white dwarf, which is the hot, compact core of a previously much larger star. The white dwarf steals material from its companion star until it accrues enough to detonate a runaway nuclear reaction on its surface. Until recently, astronomers could only infer the early stages of these eruptions indirectly, because the expanding material appeared as a single unresolved point of light.

“Instead of seeing just a simple flash of light, we’re now uncovering the true complexity of how these explosions unfold. It’s like going from a grainy black-and-white photo to high-definition video,” said Elias Aydi, lead author of the study and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Texas Tech University. “These observations allow us to watch a stellar explosion in real time, something that is very complicated and has long been thought to be extremely challenging.”

The best there is at what they do

The U-M contingent of the team helped develop the software and hardware to combine light from the multiple telescopes in the array. The resolution of the image produced by the array is determined by the separation between its constituent telescopes, compared with more conventional telescopes that have a resolution determined by the size of their mirrors.

For comparison, the JWST space telescope uses a 20-foot-plus mirror to produce its stunning images. Meanwhile, CHARA’s telescopes are separated by 300 yards.

“In terms of resolution, we have the imaging ability of a telescope that’s three football fields across,” Monnier said. “It’s the world’s highest resolution in that regard, so we’re making the best images you can make using these facilities.”

The team used this technique to image two different novae that erupted in 2021. One, Nova V1674 Herculis, was among the fastest on record, brightening and fading in just days. Images revealed two distinct, perpendicular outflows of gas—evidence that the explosion was powered by multiple interacting ejections.

The second, Nova V1405 Cassiopeiae, evolved much more slowly. It held onto its outer layers for more than 50 days before finally ejecting them, providing the first clear evidence of a delayed expulsion. When the material was finally expelled, new shocks were triggered.

The team was able to develop and verify these interpretations using data from other observatories, including the International Gemini Observatory and NASA’s Fermi Large Area Telescope.

“Novae are more than fireworks in our galaxy—they are laboratories for extreme physics,” said Laura Chomiuk, a co-author from Michigan State University and an expert on stellar explosions. “By seeing how and when the material is ejected, we can finally connect the dots between the nuclear reactions on the star’s surface, the geometry of the ejected material and the high-energy radiation we detect from space.”

The findings challenge the long-held view that nova eruptions are single, impulsive events. Instead, they point to a variety of ejection pathways, including multiple outflows and delayed envelope release, reshaping our understanding of these cosmic blasts.

“This is just the beginning,” Aydi said. “With more observations like these, we can finally start answering big questions about how stars live, die and affect their surroundings. Novae, once seen as simple explosions, are turning out to be much richer and more fascinating than we imagined.”

Dopamine neurons—the cells that drive reward and motivation while we’re awake—become surprisingly active during nonrapid eye movement sleep right after we learn something new.

According to a new University of Michigan study funded by two federal grants, this night surge that is synchronized with memory-boosting sleep spindles, helps strengthen motor memories and improves motor skills.

The findings challenge long-held assumptions about dopamine’s role in the brain, showing that these neurons don’t just support learning during the day—they actively help lock in new skills while we sleep, said study co-author Ada Eban-Rothschild, U-M associate professor of psychology.

“As alterations in dopamine signaling are associated with neurodegenerative diseases that also involve motor deficits and sleep disturbances, understanding these links could pave the way for improved therapeutics and advancements in human health,” she said.

The study focused on specific midbrain dopamine neurons that become active after learning, but only during nonrapid eye movement, or NREM, sleep. This burst of activity helps the brain fine-tune and reinforce newly learned movements, contributing to more precise motor performance once awake.

Understanding how dopamine supports motor learning at night also sheds light on the broader importance of sleep in shaping behavior, said Eban-Rothschild and colleagues.

“The findings highlight that sleep is an active biological period during which key neural circuits strengthen the skills and patterns we rely on every day,” she said.

By revealing how dopamine helps consolidate motor memories during sleep, the researchers say the findings open a new window into brain health: It may eventually guide the development of therapies that target both sleep and dopamine pathways, offering new hope for improving motor function and quality of life in affected individuals.

The study, published in the Journal Science Advances, received federal grant funding from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01 NS131821) and National Institute of Mental health (F31Mh132287).

In addition to Eban-Rothschild, the study’s authors are Bibi Alika Sulaman, Eric Chen, Aaron Crane, Sangjin Lee and Gideon Rothschild.

EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: 10:30-11:30 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 6, 2025

EVENT: As 2025 comes to an end, so too does the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Saturday Morning Physics, or SMP, at the University of Michigan. Join the SMP crew for a final celebration of this momentous science outreach program, which will feature engaging physics demonstrations designed with the whole family in mind. Staff from U-M’s Demonstration Lab will be on site at 9:45 a.m. and attendees are welcome to arrive early or stay after the presentation to interact with the demos.

The event is free and open to the public.

PLACE: Weiser Hall, 500 Church St., Ann Arbor

PARKING: Available at the Church Street Parking Structure for $10/car

SPONSORS: The U-M Department of Physics and friends of the program

LIVESTREAM: Those who are interested but unable to attend in person can watch the event live on this YouTube link.

A University of Michigan study found that people in Ghana and across the Global South who recycle electronic waste face a difficult paradox: earning livelihoods to ensure survival comes at the cost of severe long-term exposure to toxicity and dramatic environmental pollution.

Every year, the world throws out 62 million tons of electronic waste, or e-waste, according to the United Nations. E-waste recycling recovers important minerals for global supply, such as copper, aluminum and lithium-ion batteries. But less than a quarter of this e-waste is captured and recycled formally, or under regulated conditions. The majority of e-waste is recycled informally, without protection, regulation or registration with the state. About 15% of the world’s e-waste is sent to Ghana.

A team led by Brandon Marc Finn, assistant research scientist at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, examined Agbogbloshie, a settlement that has sprung up near one of the world’s biggest informal e-waste sites, located in Accra, Ghana. In a series of 55 field interviews in the settlement, Finn documented what he calls the “informal paradox.” In this paradox, the unregulated recycling work done by e-waste workers compromises their health as well as the environment of the city.

Together with SEAS scientist Dimitris Gounaridis and University of Melbourne professor Patrick Cobbinah, Finn found that as more people moved to Agbogbloshie, air pollution in the form of particulate matter surrounding the settlement intensified, further endangering human and environmental health. The team’s results are published in the journal Urban Sustainability and supported by grants from the Graham Sustainability Institute and the African Studies Center at U-M.

In Agbogbloshie, people recycle e-waste by burning plastic away from wires and electronics or use acid to leach valuable minerals from the e-waste. Particulate matter from these open pits settles over the region, while other pollutants from the refuse seep into the soil and nearby lagoon. The workers sell these extracted metals to local buyers, who in turn sell the minerals back into the global supply chain. These minerals are essential for our everyday energy needs, including for global decarbonization efforts.

People conduct informal e-waste work for rational reasons, Finn says. Many are migrants from the north of the country, which faces extreme poverty and conflict. E-waste reaches Ghana from across the Global North and parts of Africa, where old and often unusable electronics are mislabeled as charitable donations or usable electronic items.

“We have these long-term unequivocally dangerous social and environmental outcomes, but the paradox is that people are using this as perhaps the only way to earn money, or the only way to actually pursue upward socioeconomic mobility,” Finn said. “If circular economies rely on exploitation and exposure to toxicity, as our research shows, they cannot be assumed to be sustainable. We need minerals for the energy transition, but the integrity of their supply chains is just as important as the outcome of clean energy itself.”

Finn worked with Gounaridis, a geospatial data scientist at SEAS, to understand the scale of the challenge. Gounaridis examined the relationship between the growing population in and around Agbogbloshie and air pollution as represented by fine, inhalable particles in the air with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less, called PM 2.5. PM 2.5 in the region largely comes from the open burning of plastics.

Gounaridis gathered 20 years’ worth of geospatial data about population changes, PM2.5 concentration levels and the footprints of 200,000 buildings surrounding Agbogbloshie.

“We found a positive relationship between urbanization and particulate matter, which means that over the last decades, air pollution increased and so did the population,” he said. “This relationship was most pronounced in Agbogbloshie, where people moved for work and were exposed to severe air pollution from open e-waste burning.

This dynamic is closely intertwined, the researchers found: Urban population growth is driven by economic necessity, yet the presence and activity of e-waste workers further exacerbate the pollution they endure.

“The paper raises the broader question of how to regulate informal economies and settlements across the Global South,” Finn said. “Previous efforts either alienate people from their housing and livelihood through brutal evictions or create inaccessible higher barriers to market entry, or they completely ignore the problems and fail to intervene at all.”

Finn suggests a hybridized “middle ground” strategy in order to mitigate harms, provide financial and technical support, and reduce environmental pollution while still allowing people to seek shelter and create livelihoods for themselves, which are often only available through informal means. Such strategies could include providing people with wire-stripping tools so they can access copper from e-waste without burning it.

Finn also suggests having a central processing unit where people can recycle e-waste with some level of control. A governing center could also help increase transparency about who buys recycled materials and how they are reincorporated into the global supply, thereby strengthening safety measures around e-waste recycling.

“Interventions into the informal paradox, in Ghana and more broadly, are desperately needed,” Finn said. “However, the nature of these interventions is uncertain, and there are very real risks that policies that fail to understand these contexts and challenges worsen the outcomes for some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Local governments are responsible for many services people rely on daily, like schools, parks and public safety. But the money available to pay for these services depends heavily on how much taxable property wealth sits inside each city or town’s borders. And those borders can make a huge difference.

A new University of Michigan study shows how the patchwork of city boundaries and economic segregation combine to create a “tax base fragmentation.” In simple terms, this means that property wealth is unevenly spread out across the many small cities, towns and villages inside a metro area. Some places end up with tons of taxable wealth, while others—sometimes right next door—have very little. And that affects how well each local government can fund basic public services.

Researchers analyzed 138 million property tax records across the country to map out where property wealth is concentrated. In many large cities, the gaps are extreme—and are shaped not only by income inequality, but also by the way state laws allow regions to be carved into many tiny local governments.

The team created two new metrics:

• Municipal tax havens are ultra-wealthy cities with far more property wealth per person than the rest of their metro area. This includes places like Malibu and Miami Beach, but also Lake Angelus and Bloomfield Hills outside of Detroit, and many smaller towns people probably never heard of.
• Fiscally impoverished jurisdictions are on the opposite end: struggling municipalities with tiny tax bases that make it hard to fund even basic services. In Michigan, these include Detroit, Inkster, Flint and Saginaw, among others.

Robert Manduca, assistant professor of sociology and the study’s first author, notes that the findings show major inequality across hundreds of U.S. metros. In some states, laws allow wealthier areas to form separate municipalities, keeping their property wealth inside small borders rather than sharing it with surrounding communities. This creates big winners and big losers—even in metros that look wealthy overall, he said.

The study also identified places researchers call “municipal tax havens” and “fiscal deserts.”

• Municipal tax havens are ultra-wealthy cities with far more property wealth per person than the rest of their metro area—places like Malibu and Miami Beach, but also many smaller towns you’ve probably never heard of.
• Fiscal deserts are on the opposite end: struggling municipalities with tiny tax bases that make it hard to fund even basic services.

Overall, the study shows that tax base fragmentation is a major—and often overlooked—driver of inequality between communities in the same metro area. It highlights how local boundaries can protect wealth in some places while deepening financial stress in others.

The study appears in Socio-Economic Review. Co-authors with Manduca are Brian Highsmith (UCLA) and Jacob Waggoner (Harvard). To accompany the study, the researchers created an interactive web visualization mapping the fiscal capacity of every municipality nationwide, which allows users to examine tax base fragmentation in their own metropolitan areas.

There is less than a 5% chance that anomalies in earlier neutrino experiments can be explained by the existence of a single new particle

Scientists are closing the door on one explanation for a mystery that has plagued particle physics for decades. An international collaboration of scientists, which includes researchers from the University of Michigan, announced that it found no evidence for a so-called “sterile neutrino.”

This new particle was proposed to explain results from experiments happening since roughly the turn of the 21st century that couldn’t be reconciled with just the three known neutrinos. Now, however, the cutting-edge MicroBooNE experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, has ruled out the sterile neutrino as a solution to that problem with 95% certainty. The research team published its results in the journal Nature.

“MicroBooNE is exposed to two different neutrino beams while using the same detector. This provides an extra, enhanced sensitivity because you don’t have the systematic uncertainties that would come with using different detectors,” said Joshua Spitz, a professor of physics at U-M and a collaborator who’s been working on MicroBooNE since its inception.

“And the punchline is, basically, we don’t see anything we didn’t expect. We’re able to rule out the sterile neutrino as the explanation for the anomalies in earlier experiments.”

Anomalies

MicroBooNE’s predecessors had revealed neutrinos behaving in a way inconsistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, which successfully accounts for many of the fundamental particles and interactions at work in the universe. And, while the Standard Model is a triumph of modern physics, scientists know it still has some holes.

“The Standard Model does a great job describing a host of phenomena in the natural world,” said Matthew Toups, Fermilab senior scientist and co-spokesperson for MicroBooNE. “And at the same time, we know it’s incomplete. It doesn’t account for dark matter, dark energy or gravity.”

When neutrino experiments began showing inconsistencies with the Standard Model, they opened exciting pathways to potentially discover new physics and address deficits of the Standard Model.

According to the Standard Model there are three types, or flavors, of neutrino: muon, electron and tau. Neutrinos can switch or oscillate between these flavors, changing, for instance, from a muon neutrino to an electron neutrino. Scientists have been studying how neutrinos oscillate for decades, providing a strong foundation for understanding how often neutrinos naturally change flavor.

The Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector, or LSND, at Los Alamos National Laboratory raised the first hints that our understanding wasn’t quite aligning with reality in 1995. Fermilab then launched an experiment called MiniBooNE to verify the LSND results. Both experiments made observations suggesting that muon neutrinos were oscillating into electron neutrinos over shorter distances than are possible with only three neutrino flavors.

“They saw flavor change on a length scale that is just not consistent with there only being three neutrinos,” said Justin Evans, a professor at the University of Manchester and co-spokesperson for MicroBooNE. “And the most popular explanation over the past 30 years to explain the anomaly is that there’s a sterile neutrino.”

Now MicroBooNE has ruled out that explanation.

Looking ahead

Researchers have offered other hypotheses to explain the anomalies, said Spitz of U-M. One line of thinking is that there are “unknown unknowns” in the design, operation or interpretation of the previous experiments that give rise to the appearance of too-short oscillations.

“The other path is that you can start thinking about the existence of more than one sterile neutrino participating in oscillations,” Spitz said.

There could also be explanations aside from sterile neutrinos, said Benjamin Bogart, a doctoral student at U-M and co-author of the new study. MicroBooNE and the newer Short-Baseline Neutrino Program, or SBN, could help explore those possibilities.

“Though we closed the door on a single light sterile neutrino, MicroBooNE and SBN continue to open doors on a whole host of other scenarios—sometimes more complex and more interesting—beyond the Standard Model,” Bogart said.

The SBN Program adds a powerful multidetector approach with a near detector and a far detector to determine whether a more complicated model could explain the LSND and MiniBooNE anomalies. ICARUS, the far detector in the program, began taking beam data at Fermilab in 2021 and the Short-Baseline Near Detector, or SBND, started taking data in 2024. Both Bogart and Spitz are also collaborators on the SBND experiment.

While these experiments provide unparalleled insights into the workings of the universe, they’re also preparing the next generation of experts. For example, half of the researchers at MicroBooNE—which involves nearly 200 from 40 institutions in six countries—are students or postdocs.

That includes Bogart.

“I’m very grateful for how things have fallen in the timeline of my Ph.D., where I have lots and lots of data from MicroBooNE for analysis,” said Bogart, who noted MicroBooNE started collecting data when he was in 10th grade. “But I’ve also been able to help with some of the assembly of SBND. So I’m basically at opposite ends of the lifetimes of both these experiments, which is a unique and special opportunity that I’m really quite thankful for.”

EXPERT ANALYSIS

The Department of Education’s decision to remove nursing from the list of professional degrees will throttle access to student loans and exacerbate existing nursing shortages—especially in rural areas where advanced practice nurses provide primary care, says Sue Anne Bell, associate professor of nursing at the University of Michigan.

The DOE’s decision may cut by more than half the amount of money graduate students can borrow annually and over the life of their college careers.

According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, Michigan will face a 19% shortfall in registered nurses by 2037, making it among the 10 states facing the largest deficit.

The changes are part of the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and resulted in some graduate degrees that require professional training being cut from the list. In nursing, this means advanced practiced nurses, nurse anesthetists, clinical nurse specialists, midwives and others.

The bill imposes a lifetime borrowing cap of $100,000 for traditional graduate students and $200,000 for graduate students who kept the “professional” designation. Annually, traditional graduate students are limited to $20,500 with professional students capped at $50,000. The bill also terminates Grad PLUS loans, which graduate and professional students use for expenses not covered by other financial aid.

The move could also hamper efforts to recruit nurse educators and students. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, in 2022, nursing schools reported 2,100 faculty vacancies that resulted in 80,000 applications turned away.

Bell said the nursing faculty shortage is already the bottleneck of the U.S. nursing workforce.

“Until we expand the pipeline of advanced practice nurses who can teach, mentor and lead, we will continue to face a nursing shortage not because of lack of interest, but because of lack of capacity,” she said. “We cannot build a resilient health system without investing in the educators who train it. Expanding access to graduate nursing education is essential, not only to relieve the nursing shortage at the bedside, but also to ensure we have the clinical experts and faculty needed to prepare the next generation.

“A constrained pipeline of advanced practice nurses harms the entire health system: Patients face delays and poorer outcomes, hospitals absorb the strain of chronic understaffing, and insurers see rising costs from avoidable emergency care and readmissions.”

According to the AACN, 17.4% of the nation’s registered nurses held a master’s degree and 2.7% held a doctoral degree, and the current demand for master’s- and doctorally prepared nurses for advanced practice, clinical specialties, teaching and research roles far outstrips the supply.”

The new rules start on July 1, 2026. The DOE has not published a proposed or final rule defining professional students, and said in a statement that it may still make changes in response to public comment.

Efforts to “decouple” U.S. supply chains from China are only taking hold in industries where American firms can shift production to allied or politically aligned countries, according to new research by scholars at the University of Michigan, Princeton University and the University at Buffalo.

The study finds that having alternative suppliers is not, by itself, enough to prompt companies to reduce reliance on Chinese production. Decoupling occurs only when those alternatives are located in countries that are both economically viable and geopolitically aligned with the United States. When potential suppliers are based in nations with adversarial or uncertain relations with Washington, firms largely maintain their supply chains in China despite rising costs and political risks.

“Global order is weakening. Decoupling makes the most sense where companies can move production to places that are not just capable of manufacturing the goods, but also politically stable and friendly,” said Iain Osgood, associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

The research, published in The Review of International Organizations, examines how U.S. firms responded after the Trump administration imposed tariffs of 7.5% to 25% on nearly all imports from China beginning in 2018. The study tracks imports across thousands of product categories and compares shifts in sourcing patterns before and after the tariffs.

It found that imports from China declined most sharply in product lines where U.S. companies had existing supply options in allied markets. But when the potential replacement suppliers were located in non-aligned or rival states, imports from China remained largely unchanged. Even when those non-aligned suppliers had the manufacturing capacity to produce the same goods, firms did not shift.

This pattern shows that decoupling is being shaped not just by cost calculations but also by geopolitical considerations, the authors conclude. Relocating production to another strategically uncertain or adversarial state does little to reduce supply chain vulnerability.

The study also analyzed more than 18,000 requests that U.S. firms submitted to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative seeking exemptions from the tariffs. Companies were far more likely to request tariff exclusions when their industries lacked politically aligned supplier alternatives. In those cases, firms effectively signaled they were “stuck” with Chinese sourcing and needed relief to continue operations.

“Firms that had allied supplier options simply exited quietly,” Osgood said. “Firms without them stayed and fought the tariffs.”

The findings suggest that supply chain realignment is occurring along political blocs, not simply according to price, labor costs or logistical efficiency. That marks a departure from decades of globalization in which the location of production was determined largely by cost and scale advantages.

The authors argue that while targeted decoupling is well underway in sectors with robust allied supplier networks, the United States remains deeply dependent on China in industries where China retains dominant market share.

Because of that uneven dependency, they conclude that full economic separation between the U.S. and China remains unlikely without sustained investment in rebuilding or expanding manufacturing capacity among allied economies.

“Decoupling is easiest in sectors where allied supply chains already exist,” Osgood said. “Elsewhere, dependence will persist.”

In effect, the future of U.S.-China economic ties may hinge less on firms’ decisions or tariff policies than on the strength and depth of alliances. Without coordinated international efforts to develop alternative production networks, many industries will remain bound to China by necessity rather than choice.

Osgood’s co-authors include Ayse Eldes of Princeton University and Jieun Lee of the University of Buffalo.