Materials & Matter

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Grant Funds Research into Fungal Structures

Mushrooms are pretty amazing. They are light and porous yet have a high strength-to-weight ratio. They are absorbent. They can serve as filters.

Manufacturing a material that mimics mushrooms and other fungal structures could provide opportunities in any number of areas, ranging from aerospace engineering to clothing production.

Research Center Aimed at New Ways to Make Natural Rubber

Natural rubber is used in a wide range of products used throughout the globe. Lab-produced rubber works for many applications but is insufficient for vital items like airplane tires and specialty medical products.

Natural rubber also is a precious resource; 90% of the plants that serve as its source for are grown in a tiny area of Southeast Asia.

Physics-based Modeling Reveals Surprising Behavior of Blood Clots

A group of researchers, including physicists from UC Merced, has made discoveries about the mechanics of blood clots that could help in the development of biomaterials for tissue engineering and improved surgical adhesives.

Many materials around us, including those in cells and tissues, are made of networks of elastic fibers that resist deformation. These biological fibrous networks determine the fine balance between health and disease.

Stretchy Material That Gets Stronger When Hit Has Exciting Potential

Much of the work Yue (Jessica) Wang does at UC Merced sounds like science fiction: She creates flexible material that gets stronger the more you hit it. And it conducts electricity.

Science, yes. Fiction, no.

This work is happening. It was featured in a presentation materials scientist Di Wu from the Wang lab delivered this spring at the American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans.

New Summer Research Opportunities for Undergraduates from Across U.S.

The National Science Foundation awarded a team, led by principal investigators Professor Ajay Gopinathan and Carrie Kouadio, funding to establish a summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at UC Merced.

This new program seeks to increase the diversity of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research community.

Lukens’ Latest Research Tracks Sediment’s Journey in the Eastern Sierra

Rocks, from ponderous boulders to tiny grains of sand, are subject to the whims of moisture, weather and time as they tumble from surrounding slopes into rivers, pools and lakes.

New Partnership Offers Ph.D. Students a Path to Pedagogical Excellence

Graduate student Samuel Leventini comes from a long line of educators, and the tribology researcher thinks he might want to follow in those footsteps.

Thanks to a new supplemental grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Leventini will get the opportunity to find out if teaching is really the path for his life.

Most of the Universe Composed of Dark Energy, Researchers Show

A UC Merced researcher and her teammates around the world have succeeded in measuring the total amount of matter in the universe for the second time.

A new paper in the Astrophysical Journal, titled “Constraining Cosmological Parameters using the Cluster Mass-Richness Relation,” shows that matter makes up 31% of the universe, with the remainder consisting of dark energy — answering one of the most interesting and important questions in cosmology.

Department of Energy Awards $37 Million to Build Research Capacity

Five faculty members from the School of Natural Sciences received grants recently from the Department of Energy (DOE) under its Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) initiative.

Mega-Interstellar Structure Fuels Undergraduate’s Winning Research

Big-wave surfing is a thing these days, but hardly anyone is riding a wave as big as the one Biviana Oseguera is on.

The physics major is studying the 9,000-light-year long Radcliffe Wave, a structure made of clouds of dust and young stars that form a wave-like structure through the Milky Way.

So far, it is the largest structure of interacting nebulae described.

The rising senior recently won the Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Award, one of only two awarded to undergraduates at the American Astronomical Society meeting.