Science

For the First Time, All Avian Evolutionary Relationships Revealed Through Collaboration

April 29, 2025

Professor Emily Jane McTavish and colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have mapped the evolution of every known bird species. They created a complete evolutionary tree of bird species by combining data on 9,239 species published in nearly 300 studies between 1990 and 2024 and...

Applied Math — an ‘Oddity’ in its Field — Continues to Evolve at UC Merced

Math at UC Merced isn’t exactly like math at most other universities. Sure, there are parabolas and equations, orders of operations and cosines, but at this campus, those lead into topics...

Scientific equipment for making solar cells

UC Merced Reaches for Stars with Solar Cells

Two UC Merced physics groups are totally spacing out this year. Professors Sayantani Ghosh and David Strubbe and their students in the Department of Physics are working on a NASA initiative to...

Visiting Behavioral Economist Honored with Distinguished Cognitive Scientist Award

Imagine blending economics, psychology, and neuroscience to pioneer new ways to think about human behavior. Behavioral economist Colin Camerer does just that and was honored as the recipient of...

Cognitive Scientist Shows How Culture Shapes Personality Traits

Complex societies produce people with more varied personalities. That’s the surprising finding of a cognitive science study that attempts to understand how people develop into who they are:...

TED Audiences get the Dirt on Soil and Climate Change from Berhe

Soil is one of the foundations of life on Earth and could be an important part of the solution to climate change, if only we can stop treating it like dirt. That’s the message Professor...

Harrison Duran, a fifth-year biology student, discovered a Triceratops skull during a paleontology dig in North Dakota.

Undergrad Discovers Triceratops Skull on Paleontology Dig in North Dakota

Harrison Duran has always wanted to discover ‘the land before time,’ and his desire to dig up dinosaur bones led him to the Badlands of North Dakota, where Alice the Triceratops was...

Professor Strubbe stands in front of a research poster.

Physicist Researching Materials Chemistry to Build Better Solar Cells

Durable, reliable, affordable solar power is the future of energy, and UC Merced computational physicist Professor David Strubbe is diving into a new area of science to answer the call. Strubbe...

Stands of brown, dead trees throughout Sierra Nevada forests

Multiyear Drought Caused Massive Forest Die-off in Sierra Nevada

The most extreme drought event in hundreds of years caused a catastrophic die-off of the Sierra Nevada’s mature trees in 2015-2016. A study published today in Nature Geoscience details how...

Three Ph.D. Students Receive 2019 NSF Fellowships

UC Merced doctoral student Melissa Spence and incoming graduate students Caleb Larnerd and Cristian Sarabia were awarded Graduate Research fellowships (GRFP) from the National Science Foundation....