FACULTY RESEARCH & PUBLICATIONS
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions on the Great Plains Great Plains agricultural greenhouse gas emissions could be completely eliminated, according to researchers at Colorado State University, the University of Colorado, and the U-M, who used agricultural census data and ecosystem models to estimate the magnitude of annual greenhouse gas emissions from all agricultural sources from 1870 to 2000. “This is an important research milestone about the ways that population change shapes the environment,” said Myron Gutmann, director of the Institute of Behavioral Science at CU-Boulder, and Principal Investigator of the project. CSU’s William Parton was lead author of the article, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Contributors included ISR researcher Emily Merchant. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development provided funding, along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.
Measuring the impact of university research
Strokes steal eight years’ worth of brain function Having a stroke ages a person’s brain function by almost eight years, a new study suggests. Data on 4,900 black and white seniors over the age of 65 came from the ISR Health and Retirement Study, funded by the National Institute on Aging. In both black and white patients, having had a stroke meant that their score on a test of memory and thinking speed had dropped as much as it would have if they had aged 7.9 years overnight. Study authors include Kenneth Langa, who holds a joint appointment at the U-M Medical School and at ISR.
Government, industry and foundations spend more than $65 billion each year on research conducted at the nation’s universities. The impact of this investment – on the economy as well as on scientific progress – is being documented by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), a consortium based at ISR. “We are extending earlier work to explain the public value of research investments,” says U-M sociologist Jason OwenSmith, executive director of the Institute. “In the next few years we plan to expand both our member and user communities to include campuses across the country and around the world.” IRIS website: http://iris.isr.umich.edu/
More on the study: http://bit.ly/1LjxIYk
See article: http://bit.ly/1Irrwu4
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ISR SAMPLER
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FALL 2015
9/14/2015 1:23:00 PM