The National Science Foundation is honoring UC Merced Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe with a Faculty Early Career Development Award to support her examination of how soil helps regulate the climate.

The awards are given to junior faculty members who “who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations,” the NSF said.

For Helen Dahman, college was always more marathon than sprint.

Now 73, Dahman was just out of high school when she took her first college classes. But she wasn’t ready then and instead entered the workforce, married, raised a family and volunteered at her sons’ schools.

The entrepreneurial mindset is as much an inherent part of the atmosphere at UC Merced as it is at any start-up.

But now two students, Eduardo Rojas-Flores and Nick Fong, are on a mission to help bring even greater levels of innovation and venture activity to the campus.

Improvements for a ubiquitous device that cools high-powered electronics aboard military aircraft could do more than just earn a group of engineering students their senior capstone design credits.

It could also win a competition funded and hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

The environment affects the way genetic populations move, and similar environments likely play a bigger role in how a species develops than does geographic distance.

Those are just two of the discoveries Professor Jason Sexton has made while studying the monkey flower, a California native that is practically in his back yard, now that he has joined UC Merced.

Two researchers from the University of California, Merced, are slated to take part in the UC Drought Science, Policy and Management Summit at the state Capitol this week.

In a megadrought like the one California is experiencing, people tend to look at how much rainfall has come along.

But it also matters when the snowmelt releases its cache, because the snowpack is the state’s natural reservoir.

UC Merced students are now using some of the latest and most popular Microsoft Office applications without having to dig into their wallets.

Large, naturally occurring low-oxygen zones in the Pacific appear to be expanding, and there is a sharp change in the number of bacteria that produce and consume different forms of toxic sulfur, according to a UC Merced researcher’s latest paper in Nature Communications.

These expanding deoxygenated zones could also contribute to climate change, which, in turn, appears to contribute to their growth.

TaNayiah Bryels didn’t get the lead role of Mary in her first-grade Christmas pageant, but it did spark a lifelong interest in theater.