“You’re going to build a what?” That’s what Tony Fadell’s wife, Dani, said to him in 2009 when he told her his idea for a new company. Fadell is one of the most sought-after talents in the world of gadgetry—the University of Michigan alum designed the hardware for the iPod, and headed Apple’s iPod and iPhone division before leaving his VP post to spend time with his wife and two young children, living an idyllic year in Paris.

“When I committed myself to writing,” says U-M alumna Jesmyn Ward, “I did so for several reasons: I was in my early 20s and my younger brother had just died. And since living through my grief for my brother meant understanding that life was a feeble, unpredictable thing, I wanted to do something with my time here that would have meaning.”

In 2010, four years after her first attempt, Diana applied to the same medical school as before. She had confidence, experience and credibility from her four years of hard work; surely this was it. Once again she got up early. Once again she went out to grab the newspaper, anxious but excited to learn the results of her hard work. She shouldn’t be nervous. She wanted this. Today she would reach the goal she’d been working towards for four long years.

“A lot of what we’ve done with mammoths in the past has been done based on dental anatomy, based on what we can see from teeth,” said Ethan Shirley of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology. “Now, we have teeth…but we also have the whole rest of the baby mammoth: skin, fat, muscle, bone, everything in between.” Even the contents of the animals’ stomachs are preserved, a clue as to the diet of the Ice-Age beasts.

My mother is an amazing cook! As a kid, I loved spending time in the kitchen and learning from her. She taught me to cook from the heart. I didn’t know what that meant right away, but now it is part of my cooking philosophy.

Tiya Miles’ area of expertise—the intertwined legacies of Indians and black slaves—caught the eye of the anonymous nominators and evaluators who award the MacArthur Foundation grants. Miles’ work, the foundation wrote, “challenges folklore and mythology surrounding early Afro-Indian communities, while also illustrating a broader tangle of intricate personal intimacies, sovereign allegiances and ancestral tensions.” Her focus, said Miles, is fueled for reasons just as personal as they are intellectual.

In honor of Veterans Day, and in capping off three weeks of its own “Investing in Ability” events, the University of Michigan hosted an Army-Navy wheelchair basketball game at Saline High School. The teams were composed of recent veterans and wheelchair basketball professionals, the latter of whom were there to keep the pace of the game exciting and help the vets with their technique.