Here’s how the game works: First, check out the clues, numbered [1] through [8]. Guess where on campus you think you might encounter each of the objects. Then scroll down the page for the answers. Answer photos are numbered to match each clue, and the text under each photo explains the answers. Good luck!

ANSWERS

[1] LSA’s Herbarium

“It’s really unusual to turn up something that’s been overlooked in our area,” says Tony Reznicek, assistant director of LSA’s Herbarium and curator of vascular plants. “But this is quite a striking new entity.” He’s talking about the grass-like plant that he’s pulled from a cabinet in the Herbarium, the first of its kind ever described. Reznicek and his colleagues discovered it right here in Washtenaw County. The new sedge species, Carex viridistellata, looks so much like its relatives that, until only recently, it lived unnoticed in the wetlands of Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.

[2] LSA’s Reading Rooms

Golden lions peer out from book spines in the Buddhist Studies room, adjacent to the Near Eastern Studies library. Yiddish texts lean on shelves in the Martin Salinger Learning Resource Center, the library of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, alongside colorful stratigraphic maps of Jerusalem. In small libraries and reading rooms like these, departments across LSA make rare materials easily accessible to students and faculty. The beauty of these reading rooms, says Professor of History and Director of Judaic Studies Deborah Dash Moore, is the experience of browsing in a more intimate library.

[3] Glass Shop in LSA’s Department of Chemistry

“The problem with a lot of store-bought laboratory glassware,” admonishes Roy Wentz, “is that it breaks too easily.” With more than 25 years of glassblowing experience under his belt, Wentz helps keep research labs up and running across campus by handcrafting sturdy equipment at the glass shop in LSA’s Department of Chemistry. Of his many creations, Wentz is famous for his Schlenk line, a ubiquitous tool that chemists use when handling air-sensitive substances. Wentz has been reinforcing and perfecting the design for decades. “I’m from the old school,” he says. “I like to make things heavy duty.”

[4] LSA’s Biological Station

That tower among the trees helps us see the forest breathe. Sensors fastened to the two research towers at LSA’s Biological Station in Pellston, Michigan record light intensity, temperature, carbon dioxide, wind speed, wind direction, and other variables exchanged between the forest and the atmosphere. Teams of chemists, atmospheric scientists, biologists, and engineers can use the data to see how much carbon the forest absorbs and releases each year. By tracking the gases that flow between the trees and the sky, researchers can measure how much the forest breathes and grows.

[5] LSA’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology

In ancient days, losing your seal could be as big a hassle as misplacing your driver’s license or passport today. A seal pressed into damp clay created a unique “signature” that people applied to things like documents and clay vessels. Seals were so important that seal carvers in ancient Athens were forbidden to keep the impression of any that they sold, probably to prevent fraud and identity theft. And the link between a seal and a person was so strong that seals were often either buried with their original owners or handed down as valued family heirlooms. Find the seals and the impressions on display at LSA’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.

[6] Michigan Union Billiards & Games Room

When big names in billiards come to campus, they head straight to the Michigan Union Billiards & Games Room. Like Jeanette “Black Widow” Lee, the highest-ranking female pool player of the 1990s. Her first visit drew a crowd that filled risers surrounding the pool table where she played. And Nick Varner, another legendary pool player, showed up unannounced last winter. “Within ten minutes, there was an influx of fans,” says Betsy Sundholm, the Billiards Room supervisor and director of the U-M Team Pool Championship. The Billiards Room has been attracting legends since 1919.

[7] U-M Library’s Labadie Collection

The FBI began trailing Thomas Hayden (’61) when he was an LSA undergraduate in 1960. He drew enough suspicion as co-founder of the activist group Students for a Democratic Society and primary author of its manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, that his FBI file bloated to 22,000 pages. In 1982, Hayden won a seat in the California State Legislature and spent 18 years as an assembly member and senator, working for change from within the system. His personal papers, including redacted documents, are now available to scholars through the U-M Library’s Labadie Collection, which preserves the materials of people whose ideas are considered marginal or dangerous.

[8] Robert Deegan’s Research Lab

Just a peek inside his research lab is enough to see that Robert Deegan, associate professor of physics and complex systems, indulges his curiosity in all kinds of tactile phenomena. He studies droplet splashes, seed pod explosions, the rotation of sinking objects, and the famous Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction that creates a curious spiral pattern, all because he’s driven by one major question: “I’d like to understand how, at the largest scale, the planet has organized itself,” Deegan ventures. “We’d like to scale up, from our very simple experiments, to something that large.”