‘Will the girl who took my shirt and left her poetry…’

A classified personal ad from the Michigan Daily.

Before social media, before dating apps, there were personal ads, a department of newspapers’ classified advertising sections that spiced up the paper’s lifeless gray columns. A dive into The Michigan Daily’s digital archive reveals an especially creative era on campus when Michigan students used the Daily’s back pages to express their emotions and connect.

  1. Microscopic image looks like purplish and brownish ovals covering the screen. It shows PROX1 expression in a double-negative prostate tumor.

    Researchers find early driver of prostate cancer aggressiveness

    Researchers at U-M’s Rogel Cancer Center recently identified a gene that plays a key role in prostate cancer cells that have transitioned to a more aggressive, treatment-resistant form. The gene can be indirectly targeted with an existing class of drugs, suggesting a potential treatment strategy for patients with aggressive subtypes of prostate cancer.

  2. Graphic of a Michigan Medicine physician at a computer overwhelmed by email, as messages shoot out of the PC and fly through the air.

    What will it take to reduce primary care doctor burnout?

    America’s primary care doctors are burning out, cutting back their hours, and leaving their practices early, driven in part by the demands of handling the flood of digital messages from their patients. But a trio of University of Michigan studies offer hope for easing this crisis, and improving both the care that patients get and the work lives of those who provide it.

  3. Members of the U-M Symphony Band perform with high school students in Michigan.

    In perfect harmony: U-M Symphony Band tours the state

    The U-M Symphony Band toured the state in May, offering free clinics to high school students and performing in 11 communities from Belleville to Interlochen. Some 1,500 student musicians received guidance by U-M band students and faculty in interactive, side-by-side tutorials.

  4. Image of the Mackinac Bridge

    Line 5’s history, legal standing and environmental impact

    The fate of the Line 5 pipeline, which moves more than 500,000 barrels of oil and natural gas liquids between Wisconsin and Canada daily, is at another critical juncture in its 70-plus year history. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers just released its assessment of a contentious proposal to bury a section of Line 5 in a tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac.

  5. Two images side by side: one is a hospital patient smiling in bed as someone holds his hand; the other is a baby in a hospital bed, smiling.

    Pediatric surgical nurse donates liver to 2-year-old patient

    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.

  6. A view through the titanium-sapphire crystal that helps to transfer power into ZEUS’s laser pulses. At two petawatts, ZEUS is now the most powerful laser in the U.S.

    The U.S. has a new most powerful laser — and it’s at U-M

    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.

The good old summertime

Some call it Bug Camp, this isolated outpost about 20 miles south of Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge. Its actual name is the U-M Biological Station, located on more than 10,000 forested acres along the south shore of Douglas Lake in Cheboygan County. Imagine a summer camp for grownup scientists. As these gorgeous images from Michigan Photography show, the BioStation delivers an extraordinary learning and research experience for U-M faculty and students, scientists, and anyone who loves nature. 

  • Into the woods

    Forests across the United States — and especially forest soils — store massive amounts of carbon, offsetting about 10% of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions and helping to mitigate climate change. But experts warn the strength of this carbon “sink” is declining and will level off around mid-century. One way to compensate for the declining sink strength of U.S. forests is to add more trees — by actively replanting after disturbances like wildfires or by allowing forests to retake marginal croplands. (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    A bunch of people wearing Michigan-branded t-shirts and other gear go walking in the woods at the U-M BioStation in Pellston, Michigan.

  • Eternal beauty

    The BioStation traces its roots to 1874, when the University decided engineering students needed a place to learn surveying. A temporary camp moved from site to site before settling down in 1908 in Pellston, Michigan. Eventually, doors opened to students of biology and botany. Today, researchers representing institutions from around the world conduct field-based research at UMBS. (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)

    Sepia toned image of Douglas Lake from the shores of the U-M BioStation.

  • Logging time

    Researchers have been logging and burning small, contiguous plots at the BioStation in a long-running experiment that seeks to approximate, on a tiny scale, the epic lumbering and wildfire disturbances that transformed the forest at the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and throughout the Upper Great Lakes region. The first plot was established in an aspen forest by plant ecologist Frank Gates in 1936.  (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

     

    Workers in orange vests and hardhats walk down a path in a barren forest after they cut down a bunch of trees in a logging operation.

  • Lake living

    Early U-M Great Lakes research was mainly concerned with fish and fisheries, but the emphasis began to shift to basic limnology, the scientific study of bodies of freshwater such as lakes, after the 1920s. (Image credit: Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography.)

    Moonlight firepit on the shores of Douglas Lake at the U-M BioStation in Pellston, Michigan.

  • A very, very fine house

    Students from multiple schools and colleges constructed the BioStation’s straw bale building as part of a green building course created by Joe Trumpey, a professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. Students have also constructed a straw bale building at the Campus Farm on the grounds of the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor. (Image credit: Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography.)

    Student in green tank top and hard hat applies blobs of mud and straw to a structure in Pellston, Michigan at the U-M BioStation.

  • Burning for you

    Here, researchers execute a controlled burn of wooded land at the BioStation in 2017. The burn plots provide snapshots of different-aged forests and contain a changing mix of plant and tree species. Except for these small plots and a few pockets of old-growth trees, most of the forest at the BioStation dates to 1911, the last time the property was severely burned by post-logging wildfires. (Image credit: Roger Hart, Michigan Photography.)

    Researchers and scientists from the University Michigan stage a controlled burn of three plots of wooded land at the UM Biological Station near Pellston, Michigan. Smoky forest.

  • Walk this way

    In 2016, researchers at the BioStation installed motion-triggered “camera traps” to capture snapshots of the state’s diverse wildlife. They were mainly interested in carnivores, the meat eaters. Can anyone identify this print along the sandy shores of Douglas Lake? (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    Finger points to a mysterious paw print in the sand.

  • Can you hear me now?

    It is commonly assumed that as forest ecosystems age, they accumulate and “sequester” more carbon. A recent study based at the BioStation untangled carbon cycling over two centuries and found a reality more nuanced than that. The research was published in the journal Ecological Applications.  (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    A trio of young scientists in the forest at the U-M BioStation in Northern Michigan.

  • Come inside

    The indoors is as visually stimulating as the outdoors at the U-M BioStation. The largest building at camp is the Alfred H. Stockard Lakeside Laboratory with 24,000 square feet of floor space designed for biological research. (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    The interior of a facility at the U-M BioStation near Pellston, Michigan.

  • If you know, you know

    We’ll let this one speak for itself.

    (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    Two people take a rowboat into a Douglas Lake in Pellston, Michigan, for a moonlight experience.