In July the U-M Solar Car Team won the 2012 American Solar Challenge for a fourth consecutive American title. It was a record-breaking run, as the team finished the race with a 10-hour, 18-minute lead on the competition.

“I forget that this is weird,” says urban farmer, entrepreneur, and alumna Carolyn Leadley, sitting in the shade of a mulberry tree next to her large market garden on Detroit’s east side. Leadley and husband, Jack Van Dyke, are working the land while working a hypothesis: Can urban agriculture be a viable business?

Leaders take note: A new study of gelada monkeys indicates that being the top dog—or in this case, top monkey—is even better if the alpha male occasionally concedes to subordinates.

Video: New program brings together hundreds of students to solve sustainability challenges.

Video: Michigan Sea Grant researchers are constructing rock reefs to boost populations of lake sturgeon and other rare native fish. First stop: the St. Clair River delta northeast of Detroit. The goal is to promote “really robust, self-sustaining populations of lake sturgeon, whitefish, and walleye,” says project leader Jennifer Read.

Fifty million years ago, India slammed into Eurasia, a collision that gave rise to the tallest landforms on the planet, the Himalaya Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. India and Eurasia continue to converge today, though at an ever-slowing pace. University of Michigan geomorphologist and geophysicist Marin Clark wanted to know when this motion will end and why.

Study: Pregnant female geladas show an unusually high rate of miscarriage the day after the dominant male in their group is replaced by a new male.

The percentage of Americans who believe in global warming has reached the highest level since the fall of 2009, rebounding from a period of significant decline, a new survey reports.

Because they grow in calcium-rich soils, sugar maple forests in the Great Lakes region have largely been spared the damage caused by acid rain in the Northeast. But now, U-M ecologists has uncovered a different and previously unstudied mechanism by which acid rain harms sugar maple seedlings in Upper Great Lakes forests.