Toolik Field Station in Alaska. Photo: Marcin Szczepanski, Michigan Engineering.

From the Edge of the Arctic

The Arctic is frozen but melting, vulnerable but hardy.

At the top of the world, the climate is changing fast. A Michigan Engineer tracks the planet’s vital signs.

Latest Feature Stories

Hacking Health Care

How big data is driving big changes in medicine

Jenna Wiens, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at U-M, might add extra years to your life, thanks to one of her algorithms. |Long Read

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Two desks lit with lamps in a darkened study center. Students study and fall asleep on the desks.

Exam Week

The Lights Never Turn Off

The air wafts through the stacks of books, thick with the smell of greasy and stale food, clothes that have been slept and worn through for days on end, and the bodies that begrudgingly live through this existence. |Long Read

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Skunk Works

Kelly Johnson to the Rescue

Though the urgency for the Shooting Star might have been exaggerated, the Nazi threat, coupled with Johnson’s peculiar characteristics, was perhaps the only way such a unique operation might ever have been formed in the first place. |Long Read

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The Wrestler

Balancing Olympic Training and Astronaut Ambitions

In between problem sets, design projects and exams this academic year, the rising star trained for Olympic tryouts. |Long Read

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A manufactured photograph of a blacked out Ann Arbor skyline with a green aurora filling the sky.

Lights Out

A Dramatization of Disaster and the Science Behind It

Eighteen hours before the power went out, scientists reported an enormous solar flare. |Long Read

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An Unlikely Partnership

It seemed like a simple project to help a village get clean water. Things aren’t always as simple as they seem.

Three University of Michigan students, members of an engineering student team called BLUElab, have come to Chaguitón to learn more about the village’s reported water problems and perhaps design a solution. |Long Read

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Is It Time to Get Serious About Geoengineering?

As climate change looms, can we afford to take controversial ideas off the table?

Several techniques fall under the umbrella term “geoengineering,” a field of study that focuses on limiting the effects of climate change by deliberately manipulating the earth’s climate system. |Long Read

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Out of the #Flood

Local kids cool off in Ciliwung River in a neighborhood called Kampung Bukit Duri in Jakarta. Photo by Marcin Szczepanski

In the face of disaster, a city’s social media is saving lives and infrastructure. Is this just the beginning for crowd-sourced salvation? |Long Read

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Illustration of bomb with lit fuse made of words

A Matter of Time

How the Internet of Things infiltrated one home, and what it could signal about the future of privacy and security.

How the Internet of Things infiltrated one home, and what it could signal about the future of privacy and security. |Long Read

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How We Roll

Is America Ready for a Driverless Future?

Going driverless could be the biggest reboot of the American transportation system since the horse and buggy went the way of, well, the horse and buggy. Are we ready to make it happen? |Long Read

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Sketch of programmer at desk. Illustration: Steve Alvey, Michigan Engineering.

How the Net Was Won

The ARPANET came before it. And the World Wide Web and browser technology would later make it accessible for the masses. But in between, a small Ann Arbor-based group labored on the NSFNET in relative obscurity to build—and ultimately to save—the Internet. |Long Read

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