“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.

“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.”

U-M engineering professor Jessy Grizzle and his students have built a robot that can successfully navigate uneven surfaces—a critical talent for robots to handle movement over most of the planet’s surface. Includes video.

“When we talk to local officials across the state, we find that most of them feel that the stimulus has not helped improve their local economies so far, and is unlikely to help them in the future,” said U-M’s Brian Jacob.

The projects have been included in the National Science Foundation’s “Sensational 60” list of scientific discoveries or advances that have had a major impact on Americans. They include studies on elections and the economy as well as crucial medical advances.

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).