For the first time, load-bearing structures like bridges and shelters can be made with origami modules — versatile components that can fold compactly and adapt into different shapes. It’s an advance that could enable communities to quickly rebuild facilities and systems damaged or destroyed during natural disasters, or allow for construction in places that were previously considered impractical, including outer space.

When Italy’s Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it buried the palatial villa of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. These black and brittle papyri may look like charred croissants, but U-M classicist Richard Janko believes they contain lost masterpieces of literature, history, and philosophy.

Purpose and mattering. They’re essential to happiness and healthiness, researchers say. But those feelings can be hard to attain, especially for individuals who may be more prone to feeling purposeless. Professor John Piette, director of the U-M Center for Managing Chronic Disease, discusses V-SPEAK, his latest project with U.S. veterans.

In a first for college sports, the National Labor Relations Board recently ruled that men’s basketball players at Dartmouth College are school employees and ordered a union vote. Sports economist Richard Paulsen, assistant professor of sport management at U-M’s School of Kinesiology, discusses how unions might look for college athletes.

A large new genetic and dietary study of snakes, from an international team led by University of Michigan biologists, suggests these legless wonders are ‘evolutionary winners.’ Massive shifts in traits associated with feeding, locomotion, and sensory processing have allowed them to be ‘evolutionarily flexible,’ researchers say.

Though it’s only February, many of the millions of people who resolved to lose weight in 2024 have already fled the dreaded bathroom scale. Focusing primarily (on) the numbers is not an effective way to track our progress, says clinical exercise physiologist Laura Richardson. Start thinking about how you feel, not how much you weigh.

SuperAgers are showing us it’s possible to enjoy quality cognition as we age, says neuropsychologist Amanda Maher. She is leading U-M’s site for the SuperAging Research Initiative, one of six hubs in the U.S. and Canada studying the biological, genetic, and psychosocial factors contributing to resilient cognition.

Increasingly common rain-on-snow weather events are reducing snowpack and washing away nutrients from soils to our streams and lakes. This winter, snow science researchers at U-M’s Biological Station are tracking the snowpack at an hourly rate to get a deeper understanding of the complexities of global environmental change.

A new U-M-led international study finds that fruits and vegetables grown in urban farms and gardens have a carbon footprint that is, on average, six times greater than conventionally grown produce. However, a few city-grown crops equaled or outperformed conventional agriculture under certain conditions.