Environment

As more renewable energy projects take hold in California, there is more need for effective ways to store that energy.

A paper published by a UC Merced research team examines how the need for storage can vary for different combinations of renewable resources.

At UC Merced, mercury is a regional challenge that student and faculty researchers have been tackling for several years. Mercury was used to extract gold during the Gold Rush in California, and the element was also mined at the New Almaden site, at one time the second-largest mercury mine in the world near today’s Silicon Valley.

Professor Rebecca Ryals has made campus history by being named UC Merced’s inaugural Presidential Chair in Climate Change. The appointment was recommended by her peers and Dean Betsy Dumont from the School of Natural Sciences in recognition of Ryals’ outstanding research, teaching and service.

It's time for the campus and the community to celebrate UC Merced’s high-level research during Research Week, March 6 through 10.

The annual research showcase, hosted by the Office of Research and Economic Development, kicks off with a Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI) event titled “Climate, Environment and Health: Impacting the San Joaquin Valley and Beyond.”

Soil biogeochemistry Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe — who is on leave from UC Merced while she serves as federal director of the Office of Science for the Department of Energy — has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

In the wake of record-breaking rain and snow this winter, experts have cautioned that despite the deluge, California remains in a drought.

The United States Drought Monitor shows much of California still experiencing "moderate drought," and in some places "severe drought." That is a big improvement from last month, when much of the state was in "severe drought" with 7 percent of California in what was considered "exceptional drought" conditions.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a greenhouse gas that is contributing to irreversible climate change. Scientists know how to capture CO₂, and they know how to transform it into useful molecules and materials.

But that transformation is neither energy nor cost-effective.

Through a prestigious grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), a diverse group of scientists, including a chemist from UC Merced, plan to address that problem by coupling two chemistries which are known to work independently, but don't work well together.

For the first time, UC Merced faculty members from each of the campus’s three schools have been chosen as principal investigators on some of the 21 exciting new projects that are being funded through UC’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI).

In addition, UC Merced researchers are collaborating on 10 of the other projects.

Although climate change is still a very real challenge, the past decades of efforts to reduce the effects of human activities on the atmosphere have been potent enough to have thrown off the models scientists use to understand and forecast the atmosphere’s chemical composition and cleansing capacity.

Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Emily Moran and collaborators at several other universities are set to conduct a continental-scale analysis of climate change effects on tree reproduction.