Lifting for FestiFall
Applications sought for Arts Research: Incubation & Acceleration program
The Arts Research: Incubation & Acceleration program is accepting grant applications for the first round of funding in the 2024-25 academic year. The ARIA program seeks to elevate and expand arts research and creative practice across U-M’s campuses. It supports projects centered in the arts that ask creative questions and move toward new ideas and knowledge and invites new forms of collaboration and interaction within and beyond the arts. Approximately 12-20 grants will be awarded in two rounds during 2024-25. Faculty applying for individual projects are eligible for up to $25,000, and research teams are eligible for up to $50,000. Projects will be funded for periods of up to two years. Funding can support projects in pilot or incubation stages or those entering new stages of development and dissemination. Applications for the first round are due by 5 p.m. Oct. 16. Learn more and apply online at research.umich.edu/arts-research-incubation-acceleration-aria/.
ICPSR offers tools to aid researchers with NIH-related data sharing
U-M researchers navigating recent changes in the National Institutes of Health Data Management and Sharing policy on data sharing now have several new online resources from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the Institute for Social Research. This includes webinar recordings and a resource page with guidance for U-M and broader research community. These resources are for everyone and will be of special interest to NIH investigators at any phase of the research process. Find answers to key questions and links to resources and more information.
In six new rogue worlds, Webb Telescope finds more star birth clues
An international collaboration that included the University of Michigan has spotted six likely rogue worlds — objects with planetlike masses but untethered from any star’s gravity — using the James Webb Space Telescope. The discovery includes the lightest rogue planet candidate ever identified with a dusty disk around it. The elusive objects offer new evidence that the same cosmic processes that give birth to stars may also play a common role in making objects only slightly bigger than Jupiter. The findings come from the JWST’s deepest survey of the young nebula NGC1333, a star-forming cluster about a thousand light-years away in the Perseus constellation. A new image from the survey released by the European Space Agency shows NGC1333 glowing with dramatic displays of interstellar dust and clouds. A paper detailing the survey’s findings has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. Read more about this research.
Carbon emissions from forest soil will likely grow with rising temperatures
The soils of northern forests are key reservoirs that help keep the carbon dioxide that trees inhale and use for photosynthesis from making it back into the atmosphere. But a unique experiment led by Peter Reich, director of U-M’s Institute for Global Change Biology, is showing that, on a warming planet, more carbon is escaping the soil than is being added by plants. “This is not good news because it suggests that, as the world warms, soils are going to give back some of their carbon to the atmosphere,” said Reich, who also is the Filibert Roth Collegiate Professor of Environment and Sustainability. By understanding how rising temperatures affect the flow of carbon into and out of soils, scientists can better understand and forecast changes in our planet’s climate. Forests, for their part, store roughly 40% of the Earth’s soil carbon. Read more about this research.
— Compiled by James Iseler, The University Record
