University of Michigan startup companies took home the $500,000 grand prize and the $150,000 first runner-up prize on Saturday at one of the nation’s largest business plan competitions. Two other U-M-created companies received cash awards as well.

Looking for hopeful economic signs? Startups launched by students and faculty are transforming the way Michigan thinks about business.

Related: Four U-M startup companies win prizes in business plan competition

At U-M’s marine hydrodynamics lab, artist and inventor Anthony Reale is testing a portable generator, based on the shape of the basking shark’s mouth, that provides electrical power from river currents.

In the 1960s, psychiatry saw an astonishing but largely hidden phenomenon. Schizophrenia, once seen as a disease of anxious, well-off white women, became a go-to diagnosis of angry, urban black men. How did madness, blackness and civil rights become linked, and what were the consequences for patients and society? U-M psychiatry professor Jonathan Metzl looks for answers.

Why would U-M embark on a formal research collaboration with a university in Shanghai?

Automakers at the 2010 North American International Auto Show have big hopes for their new vehicles—hipper, more fuel-efficient, environmentally sound cars.

An alum’s story of how U-M prof Edward Seidensticker changed his life through poetry.

Residents of rural Kenya now have e-mail accounts and Internet access thanks in part to the work of U-M engineering students.

Chair of the University of Michigan’s Department of Neurosurgery, Dr. Karin Muraszko shines as both a brain surgeon and a person. In this moving video, originally produced by Michigan Television for the Big Ten Network, Dr. Muraszko describes the challenges of brain surgery, overcoming disability and sexism, and helping families face the possible loss of a child.