Biological Sciences

By Jeremy Olson for UC Merced Magazine

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the fall 2015 issue of UC Merced Magazine.

Professor Danielle Edwards is part of a team of researchers that made a huge discovery recently about two groups of giant Galapagos tortoises — they are actually two different species.

The team’s paper, entitled “Description of a new Galapagos Giant Tortoise Species (Chelonoidis; Testudines: Testudinidae) from Cerro Fatal on Santa Cruz Island,” appears online today in the journal PlosOne.

While many young women her age are th

UC Merced researchers won four of only 11 seed grants given out by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) for the year.

CITRIS received 24 highly competitive proposals from the four CITRIS campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz. The 11 proposals receive an average of $55,000 each for a total of $600,000 in interdisciplinary research funds. The winning proposals include work that will use data analytics to optimize health care, communications and agriculture applications.

Neurobiologists have identified different types of neurons in the brain, but have struggled to put that knowledge into a useful context because they don't yet fully understand what makes one neuron behave differently from another.

Researchers at the University of California, Merced, have taken another step toward unlocking the mysteries of the biologic

Professor Clarissa J.