“These findings raise serious doubts about the belief that the type of political regime and the level of health care spending exert major influences on population health,” says U-M’s Jose A. Tapia Granados.

“What our study suggests is that many [newly discovered DNA] variants are associated with changes in glucose levels long before people get diabetes,” said U-M’s Michael Boehnke, a co-leader of the study.

Related:

• “Security guard” zinc is off-duty in diabetes

Black people with cancer are up to twice as likely as other races to die from their disease. “Black cancer patients don’t fare as well as whites. Their cancers are diagnosed at a later stage, the care they receive is often not as good—or they get no care at all,” says U-M’s Arden Morris, M.D., M.P.H.

As if the ongoing oil spill weren’t calamity enough, U-M’s Donald Scavia predicts that this year’s “dead zone” in the Gulf—an area starved of oxygen by pollution mostly from the Mississippi River—will be one of the biggest ever. “The growth of these dead zones is an ecological time bomb,” Scavia says, that was threatening Gulf fisheries even before the spill.

New research at the University of Michigan suggests that in healthy cells, zinc acts like a security guard at a rock concert, whose job is keeping fans from turning troublesome and destructive. In molecular terms, zinc prevents a protein called amylin from forming harmful clumps similar to those found in degenerative diseases. But in the zinc-starved cellular environment of someone with type 2 diabetes, amylin has no watchful guard to rein it in.

She won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering tragic events at a New Orleans hospital following Hurricane Katrina, but that was just one small part of a remarkable career.

The University of Michigan has been named part of an energy hub using advanced capabilities of the world’s most powerful computers to make significant leaps forward in nuclear reactor design and engineering. U-M will receive up to $8.5 million for its work in the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL).

On average, women outlive men, and at any given age men have higher mortality rates. But why? U-M researcher Daniel Kruger’s new study shows that it’s the result of an evolutionary gambit: men often risk everything for the chance to reproduce.

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said U-M’s Sara Konrath. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”