Lorena Anderson

About 4.5 billion people around the globe do not have access to adequate sanitation, and what they do have — typically pit latrines and lagoons — are responsible for widespread illnesses and a portion of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

UC Merced Professor Rebecca Ryals and a group of colleagues have a solution that not only increases safety, sustainability and jobs, but reduces greenhouse gas emissions and waste-borne illnesses while producing an effective fertilizer for agriculture.

As the SPACEX Crew Dragon spacecraft left Earth today to ferry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, many Bobcats were watching the live stream with keen anticipation.

It’s not just that the flight marks the first time a commercial aerospace company will carry humans — two NASA astronauts — into Earth's orbit. The collaborative project also has special meaning for UC Merced.

Despite the challenges of making an in-person event into a remote one, students in this year’s Innovate to Grow spring showcase displayed the determination, passion and innovation Bobcats are known for.

The San Joaquin Valley — with all its agriculture and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that go with it — is one of the places most at risk because of changing snowmelt patterns, a new study shows.

Innovation is nothing new at UC Merced, but this year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, everyone on campus has had to reimagine nearly everything they do.

But leave it up to the School of Engineering to wholly reinvent its annual Innovate to Grow showcase and competition on the fly.

A UC Merced researcher and her lab have unlocked one of the mysteries that could lead to treatments — or even cures — for prion diseases in mammals.

Prion diseases are a family of rare, progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect both humans — such as with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or fatal familial insomnia — and animals, such as mad-cow disease. These disorders are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Think about biting into a fresh apple. What do you perceive? Is it juicy? Sweet? Tart? Crisp? Now remember how unpleasant it is to bite into mealy apple flesh.

Most people wouldn’t think physics has anything to do with baby babble and human language development.

But most people aren’t Ritwika Vallomparambath PanikkasserySugasree.

Flocks of starlings producing dazzling patterns across the sky are natural examples of active matter — groups of individual agents coming together to create collective dynamics.

In a study featured on last week’s cover of the journal Science, a team of researchers including a UC Merced theoretical physicist revealed new insights into what happens inside such active systems.

Two projects from a UC Merced engineering lab are making interactions with mobile devices easier and quicker, especially for blind people.

Computer science Professor Ahmed Arif and his students have developed a new way for blind people to be faster and more accurate when entering text, and a new way for all users to work with numbers.