A soon-to-be published study co-authored by Min Zhang, graduate student in informatics, finds that companies can find ideas for innovative new products in the consumer review sections on e-commerce websites like Amazon. The review sections are essentially free focus groups where consumers can leave ideas for new or improved products, says Weiguo Fan, professor of business analytics in the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business and study co-author. Finding those nuggets of consumer wisdom can be a challenge, though. Few companies have the resources to sift through thousands of comments across dozens of e-commerce sites, only a small number of which offer any kind of information that could be used for product innovation.

The Speculative Literature Foundation recently announced University of Iowa graduate student Tatiana Schlote-Bonne the winner of its 2020 Diverse Worlds Grant. Schlote-Bonne was honored for her work "The Afterlife Memoirs." She is a second year MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program inside Iowa's Department of English.

Danny Tallon is serious about space. After all, he'd love to go there. Tallon, an undergraduate physics major at the University of Iowa, studies supernovas, which are exploding stars hundreds of billions of light years from Earth. The junior from Mondamin, Iowa, is a published author on two scientific papers that describe the curious behavior of a type of supernova whose explosions defy what physicists think should be happening.