In the News
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April 3, 2026
“Many residents remain unsure about the benefits of these technologies, and concerns about data sharing are particularly pronounced. If the city hopes to expand the use of AI, it will be important to first build trust by clearly explaining how these systems will be used and how residents’ information will be safeguarded,” said Mara Ostfeld, faculty lead of the Detroit Metro Area Communities Study, whose survey with DMACS data manager Yucheng Fan and research fellow Heonuk Ha found that Detroiters view the use of artificial intelligence in local government with caution rather than enthusiasm.
DBusiness -
April 3, 2026
Nora Becker, assistant professor of internal medicine, was forced to drop parts of her research on how medical debts from serious illness can affect a person’s health after the Trump administration cut off her career development grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality last fall: “It just disappeared.” The loss of AHRQ funding “has made it very uncertain whether I will be able to build a longtime career in the field.”
Science -
April 3, 2026
Research by Richard Rood, professor emeritus of climate and space sciences and engineering, suggests that northern Michigan could see more ice storms in the future, as a warming world shifts the range for freezing rain further north: “Places where it used to be cold, below freezing all the time, it’s not always below freezing anymore. … You can’t think of what we’re experiencing as, ‘this is how it used to be, and this is where it will be.’ You are right in the middle of the change here.”
Michigan Advance -
April 2, 2026
“The increasing use of the term ‘anchor babies’ was the inflection point” on birthright citizenship, said Josh Pasek, professor of communication and media, and of political science. “It becomes very real to people. They stop thinking about it as a legal issue around the 14th Amendment and start thinking about it as a social issue that matches their views on immigration.”
The New York Times -
April 2, 2026
“Most people have mixed feelings about AI English, whether or not they always recognize it,” wrote Laura Aull, professor of English and linguistics. “Human English contains persistent, if subtle, linguistic patterns of variation and readability. By contrast, AI uses … a rather formal, dense English that is favored in academic tests and papers. It is less varied and less readable. People perceive it as robotic, but they also perceive it as smart.”
Fast Company -
April 2, 2026
“You’d have to do an ‘Ocean’s 11’-style” caper to actually succeed in stealing an election through ballot stuffing or data manipulation, said Ekow Yankah, professor and assistant dean at the Law School. “I don’t want to catastrophize. But I do think it is worth taking a moment to really think about where we are … if enough people create enough conspiracy blogs, and create enough doubt, such that they say, ‘Actually, I’m fine with this,’ then the American experiment will end.”
Concentrate -
April 1, 2026
America’s slower population growth “means there will be fewer young people in the labor force to continue national economic productivity and contribute to social programs that will support the rising senior population,” said William H. Frey, research professor at ISR’s Population Studies Center. “This places great importance on immigration as a source not only of total population growth, but to slow population aging, because immigrants and their children are younger than the rest of the population.”
Newsweek -
April 1, 2026
For a lot of allergy sufferers, spring starts with a routine — check the pollen count and brace for the day. But in Michigan, the number may not be based on real local measurement at all, said Allison Steiner, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering: “Pollen data over the U.S. is very sparse. In fact, we don’t have any sampling stations that are run by the National Allergy Bureau here in Michigan.”
WXYZ Detroit -
April 1, 2026
Sam Erman, professor of law, says the Trump administration’s arguments for ending birthright citizenship echo those put forward by jurists in the late 1800s — that a child’s citizenship is dependent on the parents’ nationality, not birth in the U.S. “I was really struck reading the government’s brief (by) how familiar it seemed from that period. The government argument to a large extent relies on … people who are repeating what (these 19th century legal scholars) said uncritically. If you strip that out of the government’s brief, it looks really weak.”
The Washington Post -
March 31, 2026
Oleg Gnedin, professor of astronomy, and graduate student Yingtian (Bill) Chen have massively expanded the number of rare stellar streams that could reveal the history of our galaxy and information about dark matter. Stellar streams are hard to spot, and as globular clusters interact with much larger star groups, tidal forces can wrest some of the stars from their path. “It’s like riding a bike with a bag of sand, only the bag has a hole in it. Those grains of sand are like the stars left behind along their trajectory,” Gnedin said.
Discover Magazine
