Jody Murray

It’s a pair of special birthdays for UC Merced’s two student-run journals for undergraduates. The Vernal Pool , which publishes creative stories, poems and images, turned 10 this academic year. Meanwhile, it’s the sweet 16th for the Undergraduate Research Journal , which provides an early taste of the lifeblood of graduate and post-grad research — peer-reviewed publication.

Fernando Malagon and his mom stood at the head of a line for guided tours of the university he plans to attend this fall. The informational stroll around UC Merced would be more for her than for him; he visited the campus five years ago on a seventh-grade field trip from Modesto.

Of course, the university has grown since then, not just in square footage but in opportunity and possibility.

There’s nothing small about this year’s Shakespeare in Yosemite production. It boasts the largest cast in the program’s seven-year history and, for the first time, features a full band to deliver the score and propel the musical numbers. The headcount for park staff in the cast is an all-time high.

“The stage will be very crowded for the curtain calls,” director Katie Brokaw said.

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Take the cultural rewards of preserving Spanish for babies and toddlers in a bilingual home. Bring in two speech pathologists steeped in techniques that make language learning irresistible for young minds. Sprinkle in bright colors, bold graphics and infectious energy. Bolt everything to the most powerful video-sharing website on the planet.

Add puppets.

The 12^th edition of the Bobcat Art Show, which debuts this week in a new space, is further proof that creativity can come from anywhere in the UC Merced community.

“In addition to the amazing work done by our Global Arts Studies students and faculty, we have some incredible pieces by engineers, finance managers, anthropologists and more – demonstrating how the power of art truly knows no bounds,” said Collin Lewis, the university’s executive director for the arts.

It was a terrible trifecta: a busted tilt skillet, an obsolete replacement part and thousands of hungry students restarting classes in six days.

For a UC Merced Dining Services team facing a logistical kitchen nightmare, the solution was a savory mix of collaboration and outside-the-pizza-box thinking. And it happened barely 12 giant steps from the broken cooker in the Pavilion dining center.

UC Merced researchers are shedding light on a little-explored aspect of cross-cultural communication that involves no spoken words but sometimes can cause confusion and anguish for children acting as interpreters for older family members.

In a thick rainforest in Papua New Guinea, they're tracking bats. Researchers glue radio transmitters to the creatures’ little, furry bodies, then wait. And wait. When a bat flits to another position, the humans sprint through the foliage, stop and take a reading.

It’s 1 a.m. The researchers will do this all night, running from spot to spot, triangulating the bats’ movements. Logging data.

Having a blast.

“It’s just fun, right?” Betsy Dumont said, recounting a moment lived on the way to becoming one of the world’s top bat biologists. “It’s hard and it’s fun.”

It was a terrible trifecta: a busted tilt skillet, an obsolete replacement part and thousands of hungry students restarting classes in six days.

For a UC Merced Dining Services team facing a logistical kitchen nightmare, the solution was a savory mix of collaboration and outside-the-pizza-box thinking. And it happened barely 12 giant steps from the broken cooker in the Pavilion dining center.

The unflinching demand for justice drives the moving images and impassioned ideas packed into the agenda of this year’s UC Merced Human Rights Film Festival, presented by the university’s Global Arts, Media & Writing Studies department.