Patty Guerra

A team from UC Merced has been selected to participate in the Department of Energy (DOE) "BattChallenge," a three-year competition to develop a battery for an electric vehicle.

Music can be entertaining, moving and, when played too loud, infuriating. It also plays a vital role in the development of children's brains, one researchers are just beginning to understand.

Nearly 65 percent of UC Merced's undergraduate students are the first in their families to go to college. Being a college student of any kind can be a thrilling, confusing, challenging, exciting, overwhelming experience, sometimes all at once. When you're the first in your family to go to college, there can be an added degree of uncertainty, as well.

In advance of First-Generation Student Week activities, the UC Merced newsroom asked some first-generation alumni and current students to share some advice for those following in their trailblazing footsteps.

UC Merced computer science and engineering teams are again taking part in the IEEExtreme Hack-a-Thon, a 24-hour challenge in which teams respond to one or more prompts to solve a problem by developing software.

More than 14,000 people, in 6,300 teams and representing 65 countries, will compete in the event Oct. 28.

Thomas Kellogg, president of the IEEE club at UC Merced, is competing for his second year. In 2022, he was part of the first team from the university to participate.

Climate change is a very real - and very scary - threat.

Climate change and its underlying primary cause - burning fossil fuels - are arguably the world's leading causes of preventable death and ill health, writes researcher Edward Maibach.

However, there are tangible ways to limit global warming, and research shows that getting the message from the health care professionals who are on the front lines of dealing with the effects of climate change can have a big impact.

Understanding and conserving biodiversity, or the variety of life in ecosystems, is key to sustaining life on Earth.

A research project funded by NASA that is launching this week in South Africa, co-led by UC Merced environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir, is aimed at better understanding the biodiversity of the region and providing new mapping tools that could be used on a global scale.

Water is the most valuable resource in the world. And it's a particularly important commodity in the Central Valley, historically a desert but also home to some of the richest agricultural soil on Earth.

The UC Merced Library and Secure Water Future co-hosted an event to discuss water policy in California, its history and what the future might look like.

Writing is still the most important, and most-used, form of communication in the world.

"Writing is crucial in that it's both a product and a process. It's in the fabric of what we do," said Paul Gibbons, teaching professor of writing studies at UC Merced. "Writing is a way of doing things in the world, of asking for things. It's still a major coin of the realm."

The new feature film "A Million Miles Away" is a universally relatable story of resilience and achievement, depicting Jose Hernández's journey from working the fields of the San Joaquin Valley to fulfilling his life-long dream of being a NASA astronaut.

But it's also a story with a very personal tie to UC Merced. Hernández, who went on to head an aerospace company and operate a vineyard, is a graduate of the University of California system and serves on the UC Board of Regents, and his son Antonio is a student at UC Merced.

UC Merced researchers will tackle climate changes in multiple ways through more than $4 million in grants recently awarded from within the university.

The Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED) issued nine awards totaling $4,096,197 for proposals that range from studying methane gas emissions to making electronic vehicles more accessible to people.