Ross School of Business Professor Emeritus Paul W. McCracken, a moderate Republican who served as an economic adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents, died in Ann Arbor in early August. He was 96. McCracken led President Richard M. Nixon’s largely unsuccessful effort to tame the rising inflation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He joined the U-M business school faculty in 1949 and kept office hours through early 2012.

Michigan eLab is a new Ann Arbor-based venture capital fund with a counterintuitive investment thesis: that it can help stop the flow of University of Michigan startups to Silicon Valley. The fund will invest in early-stage information-technology companies, including startups launched by U-M students and faculty. Doug Neal, executive director of the College of Engineering’s Center for Entrepreneurship, is the fund’s director. Renowned entrepreneur Steve Blank is an early investor.

With wolverine nose caps and glossy maize-and-blue paint, three new helicopters now service the University of Michigan Health System. The new American Eurocopter 155 B1 choppers are bigger, faster, and stronger than current models employed in U-M’s Survival Flight program. It’s the first time this model has been retrofitted for use in a hospital program.

As the Curiosity rover raced toward the surface of Mars Aug. 6, tension was thick in both NASA’s mission control and in an auditorium at U-M, where more than 100 faculty and students gathered to watch the landing. Nilton O. Rennó, professor of atmospheric, oceanic, and space sciences, was inside mission control. He is one of two U-M professors intimately involved in the mission. “Everyone was on the edge and (then) a big celebration started,” he said shortly after the rover landed on Mars.

A clinical trial overseen by U-M may provide hope to people diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). It is audacious work—the only ALS trial so far in which neural stem cells are injected directly into a patient’s spinal cord. So far, 15 patients have undergone the procedure—two of them twice—as the FDA monitors its safety. An estimated 30,000 people suffer with ALS at any given time; 5,000 are diagnosed yearly. There is no cure.

Older men are more likely than young ones to father a child who develops autism or schizophrenia, scientists report in a new study published online in Nature. If the findings hold up and extend to other brain disorders, wrote U-M’s Alexey S. Kondrashov in an editorial accompanying the study, “then collecting the sperm of young adult men and cold-storing it for later use could be a wise individual decision.”

The Michigan Engineering Zone (MEZ) is an innovative U-M program that introduces Detroit students to careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) through hands-on learning. The Discovery Channel profiled the MEZ in its 2011 documentary, Detroit in Overdrive.

Should the auto industry be worried about the Internet? It seems the more time young people stay digitally connected, the less time they feel they need to be together physically, and that results in less interest in driving, according to researchers at U-M’s Transportation Research Institute. In 1983, 69 percent of 17-year-olds had a driver’s license. Just 46 percent of that age group had a license in 2010.