Research

Study: Mass Deportations Would Cost California Economy $275 Billion, Decimate Critical Industries

June 17, 2025

Photo depicts construction materials at a building site.

Mass deportation of California's undocumented residents would open a $275 billion hole in the state's economy, cripple industries ranging from agriculture to hospitality, disrupt countless small businesses, and lead to $23 billion a year in lost tax revenue. Those are the conclusions of...

Picking Over the Past Provides Clues to the Future

UC Merced professors Jessica Blois and Justin Yeakel and their graduate students are sifting through time, picking out tiny clues that will give them a mouse’s eye view of the ecosystem that...

High-Altitude Archaeology Uncovers Earliest Evidence of Potato Consumption

Every French fry, gnocchi, tater tot and order of hash browns humans have eaten in the past 5,000 years can be traced back to one place in the world — northwestern Bolivia and southern Peru. A paper...

Massive VR System Links Merced to the World

Imagine being able to explore the newly discovered hidden chambers in the Great Pyramid of Giza or microstructures within the human brain, to work on big-data projects with CERN or participate with...

People in Eurasia are Genetic Hybrids with Evolutionary Advantages, Study Shows

It’s not just luck or practice that gets Sherpa mountaineers up the slopes of Mt. Everest each year. Functioning so well at extreme elevations is in the Sherpa and Tibetan DNA — literally. A new...

Grad Student’s Water-Mapping Work Leads to National Recognition

UC Merced graduate student Lorenzo Booth’s research into more efficient use of water for agriculture has earned him accolades from the American Water Resources Association for not only producing...

Alumnus Stays Local, Launches Environmentally Friendly Career

Stephen Ho’s experience at UC Merced helped him land an internship with E. & J. Gallo Winery in Livingston shortly after his graduation in 2012. His engineering expertise, passion for the...

The Real Horror of ‘Frankenstein:’ Human Extinction

If fictional scientist Victor Frankenstein had created a mate for his nameless Creature, humans would have gone extinct in about 4,000 years, according to a new study co-authored by a UC Merced ...

Researcher’s Work Could Help Stop Aggressive Breast Cancers

Adjunct Professor Gabriela Loots is studying why certain cancers prefer to metastasize to bone, using novel technology developed by fellow UC Merced Professor Michael Cleary. Her work, which takes...

Winston Feted for Golden Anniversary of Landmark Discovery

Fifty years ago this year, while a freshman faculty member in the University of Chicago Physics Department, Roland Winston published a paper introducing a new field he called nonimaging optics. In it...