Because of partnerships with federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, Karl Jepsen has worked for decades to build up the field of bone research. “We are just now seeing the outcomes of funded projects from 20, 30, 40 years ago,” he says.

In early November 2024, Kelly Smith and her husband received the phone call they had been waiting for since summer — a liver donor matched with their two-year-old daughter, Quinnlyn. What they didn’t know was their donor was close to home: Phil Consiglio is a nurse at U-M’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

The ZEUS laser facility has roughly doubled the peak power of any other laser in the U.S. with its first official experiment at 2 petawatts (2 quadrillion watts). “This milestone marks the beginning of experiments that move into unexplored territory for American high field science,” says Karl Krushelnick, director of U-M’s Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science.

Pediatric brain tumors are the leading cause of disease-related death in U.S. children and adolescents. When their son Samson survived his childhood diagnosis, alumni Kim Gilman and Jeff Gelfand began fundraising to advance scientific research. Their support has propelled a team of Michigan Medicine researchers, led by Maria Castro and Pedro Lowenstein, to achieve a significant milestone.

In 1914, eleven years after the Wright Brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk, the first aeronautics class was offered at U-M, launching what would become the nation’s first collegiate aeronautics program. Adventurous students soon took to the skies in gliders, simple planes — and, by the 1920s, hot air balloons. Things didn’t alway sgo as planned.

In recent years, China’s technological advancements have captured the world’s attention, with DeepSeek — a Chinese AI model — emerging as a focal point of both admiration and anxiety. This duality reflects a deeper tension in how the U.S. perceives technological progress from China, revealing complex layers of fear, competition, and reflection.

Marcus Foundation’s $30 million gift supports a collaboration between Stanford and U-M to help stroke victims regain the ability to read, write and speak. The scientists are using the world’s smallest computers linked up to the world’s most biocompatible sensors.

Desalination plants, a major and growing source of freshwater in dry regions, could produce less harmful waste using electricity and new membranes made at the University of Michigan.

A new class of semiconductors that can store information in electric fields could enable computers that run on less power, sensors with quantum precision, and the conversion of signals between electrical, optical and acoustic forms. But how they maintained two opposite electric polarizations in the same material was a mystery. Until now.