Patty Guerra

One question students considering attending UC Merced might ask is, "What's there to do around there?"

The quick answer is - a lot. There are plenty of ways for students to spend their leisure time in the greater Merced area, for students of varying interests:

Are you an outdoors enthusiast? Do you enjoy nights out with crowds of friends? Are you a devoted video game player? Do you like the challenge of thrift shopping? Do you prefer to just chill out, perhaps with a book while water laps gently at the shore?

Sarif Morningstar wondered something: "What happens if I grow plants using fog?"

The UC Merced student's efforts to find an answer to that question led to a research project they got paid to conduct. That in turn led to an opportunity to study plant biology in the UC Davis Ph.D. program.

Like Morningstar, many undergraduate students at UC Merced can get paid to do research under the newly adopted Learning Aligned Employment Program (LAEP).

Roughly a third of all food worldwide goes to waste.

Outside of the obvious direct costs, that waste has numerous other repercussions: much of it goes to landfills, where it generates methane, a greenhouse gas. Resources such as water and seeds are squandered. And at the same time, one in four people are experiencing food insecurity.

"We're wasting all this food when folks are going hungry," said Erin Meyer, Sustainable Food Programs coordinator for UC Merced.

After weathering a pandemic shutdown and some fairly withering criticism, UC Merced's food service programs have emerged better than ever.

The shutdown that started in 2020 brought about abrupt changes to food service operations - prepackaged items were the order of the day to feed students, and for catering, there were no orders of the day.

While UC Merced's Experimental Smart Farm is focused on technology and automation, it's also about machine-human collaboration.

That was among the messages UC Merced's representatives shared in a panel discussion at the "What's the Future of Agriculture in California?" symposium, held Thursday, March 30, at California State University, Fresno.

Imagine having a group of parenting experts in your back yard - researchers who are constantly conducting projects that keep them on the cutting-edge of child development. And they are eager to share their expertise, for free.

Parents in the greater Merced area don't have to imagine that. This invaluable resource is theirs through the UC Merced Child and Family Development Group .

A UC Merced researcher has a prominent role at a worldwide conference on water taking place at the United Nations this week.

Materials Science and Engineering Professor Beth Nowadnick has earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to study materials that may provide new ways to store or process information.

Nowadnick has been collaborating for the past two years with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) scientist Sinead Griffin on the project that led to the grant, which totals $379,374.

UC Merced researchers will discuss the campus's Experimental Smart Farm, as well as pressing agricultural issues, at a one-day summit later this month at California State University, Fresno.

The summit, What is the Future of Agriculture in California, is free to attend either in person or virtually March 30 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

As more renewable energy projects take hold in California, there is more need for effective ways to store that energy.

A paper published by a UC Merced research team examines how the need for storage can vary for different combinations of renewable resources.