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 fabricate solar cells in space and turn sunlight into electricity.

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’s new project aims to understand why two organic materials — that are cheaper and easier to produce than the prevalent silicon-based products — don’t last as long, and explore how to improve them.

It sounds like an easy-to-follow recipe from the world of molecular gastronomy: Dissolve nanoparticles in liquid crystals and cool to form frothy nanofoams, tiny tubes and hollow microspheres.

Imagine a cell phone you can fold up and carry in your wallet. When you drop it, nothing cracks or breaks, or if it does, it repairs itself. And when it’s time for an upgrade, the old phone will biodegrade instead of taking up space in a landfill.

Maybe you’d rather wear your laptop or tablet in the fibers of your clothes, or wear a monitor that provides constant data about your health but feels no different than your own skin.

Imagine exploring the cores of stars to understand — and ultimately control — the type of fusion that’s taking place.

High-energy density (HED) science is the study of properties and behavior of matter and radiation in extreme temperatures and pressures common to the deep interiors of the largest planets. It’s also the foundation of understanding fusion energy and high-energy astrophysical phenomena, and it’s happening at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, just 75 miles from UC Merced.

It’s a startling statistic: Nearly 30 percent of UC Merced students who start their college careers in the School of Natural Sciences (SNS) switch to majors outside the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields by their second year.

The idea for a year-end event showcasing School of Engineering students’ original designs started as a scribble on the back of a cocktail napkin and culminated in the exhibition of 12 teams’ work.

Now, six years later, Innovate to Grow (I2G) has become a premier event on campus highlighting dozens of projects and drawing audiences from across campus and throughout the community to UC Merced.

Innovate to Grow (I2G), the School of Engineering’s showcase for senior capstone projects and student ingenuity in engineering and entrepreneurship, is emerging as a twice-a-year event, thanks in large part to a $50,000 donation from Wells Fargo.

National security and a beautifully resonant violin have found a surprising link — a classic experiment in acoustics, recently replicated at the quantum scale as part of a collaborative project on quantum-enhanced motion sensing.

Zach Petrek, a second-year doctoral student in chemistry and chemical biology, can usually be found running experiments in the laboratory of his advisor, Professor Tao Ye. But this summer, he did something different — he went to NASA.

Petrek was one of seven UC Merced students to intern at NASA over the summer, an opportunity provided through MACES, the Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing.