Features

From after-school tutoring to STEM projects and community service, Michigan’s 21st Century Learning Centers give thousands of students a safe place to grow. A new $2.6M grant empowers MSU researchers to continue ensuring these programs truly make a difference.

A new international study has revealed chemical evidence of life in rocks more than 3.3 billion years old, indicating that oxygen-producing photosynthesis may have emerged nearly one billion years earlier than previously understood.

Each year, the world produces roughly 100 million tons of flexible multilayer plastic packaging — materials that keep food fresh and pharmaceuticals safe from moisture and oxygen. Yet most of these plastics are nearly impossible to recycle due to their complex, chemically incompatible layers. Michigan State University scientists have developed a new kind of plastic film that could change that.

In a new paper published in Current Biology, MSU Research Foundation Professor Seung Yon “Sue” Rhee and Research Specialist Karine Prado report that T. oblongifolia grows faster in Death Valley’s summer conditions by rapidly adjusting its photosynthetic system to withstand the heat.

The MSU Innovation Center has released its Annual Report, featuring highlights and milestones from the 2025 fiscal year.

As the 2026 midterm elections are around the corner, MSU’s Rx Kids program is associated with bolstering voter turnout and engagement as well as improving public health. According to new research supported by Rx Kids, a first-in-the-nation community-wide prenatal and infant cash prescription program, is strengthening civic engagement, especially among women of childbearing age.

When highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, first appeared in U.S. dairy cattle, it shocked the scientific community. The virus, long associated with birds, had crossed a species barrier no one anticipated. In Michigan, however, the response framework was already underway.

While artificial intelligence, or AI, tools like ChatGPT might be great for helping you pick where to go for dinner or which TV show to binge watch, would you trust it to make decisions about your medical care or finances? As AI tools become smarter and gain more widespread use in daily life, so do the stakes for the accuracy and dependability of using this evolving technology.

Evolution is usually far too slow to witness in a single human lifetime — but not in this lab. For over three decades, researchers have watched E. coli transform across more than 75,000 generations. Their Long-Term Evolution Experiment opens a rare window into how life adapts and innovates in real time. What happens inside these 12 unassuming flasks is reshaping how scientists understand evolution in the world’s most complex environments.