Patty Guerra

A grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund a project led by a UC Merced researcher looking into predicting behavior of wildfires.

Jeanette Cobian-Iñiguez is leading a team from UCs Merced and Irvine awarded $1,179,479 to predict the impact of forest fuel treatments on fire behavior, focusing on an improved understanding of the influence of surface-fuel attributes on fire behavior and severity, and ultimately, on forest carbon storage, according to a project summary.

UC Merced police officers Enrique Rodriguez and Brian Carbaugh were on routine patrol July 26. Carbaugh had recently joined the department and was undergoing field training with Rodriguez.

At 6:22 p.m., they were dispatched to the Joseph Edward Gallo Recreation Center on campus for a medical aid call. A gentleman who had been involved in a pickup basketball game had collapsed.

"The report was that someone was having a heart attack," said Chief Chou Her. "When they arrived, people were performing CPR and attaching the automatic external defibrillator."

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."