UC Merced opened Sept. 5, 2005, as the 10th campus in the University of California system and the first American research university of the 21st century. Situated near Yosemite National Park, the campus significantly expands access to the UC system for students throughout the state, with a special mission to increase college-going rates among students in the San Joaquin Valley. It also serves as a major base of advanced research, a model of sustainable design and construction, and a stimulus to economic growth and diversification throughout the region.
The universe is expanding faster than physicists would expect. To figure out what processes underlie this fast expansion rate, some researchers are first trying to rule out what processes can’t.
Many of the people caught in the wildfire that swept through Paradise, Calif., in 2018 were older adults.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Alarmingly, about half the people exposed to wildfires in Washington and Oregon were those least able to afford to protect their homes, evacuate safely and recover.
Babies still need to eat even when formula is hard to come by.
Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
Emma Kast, University of Cambridge; Jeremy McCormack, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, and Sora Kim, University of California, Merced
Megalodon, the world’s largest known shark species, swam the oceans long before humans existed. Its teeth are all that’s left, and they tell a story of an apex predator that vanished.
Fire weather reason – when wildfires are most likely to strike – has expanded almost everywhere.
Building solar panels over water sources is one way to both provide power and reduce evaporation in drought-troubled regions.
Robin Raj, Citizen Group & Solar Aquagrid
From pulling carbon dioxide out of the air to turning water into fuel, innovators are developing new technologies and pairing existing ones to help slow global warming.
An artist’s rendering of a solar canal.
Robin Raj, Citizen Group & Solar Aquagrid
Covering the state’s canals with solar panels would reduce evaporation of precious water and help meet renewable energy goals – all while saving money.
Banana plantation workers in Panama find shade under a vehicle during a break.
Jan Sochor/Latincontent/Getty Images
The risk from heat waves is about more than intensity – being able to cool off is essential, and that’s hard to find in many low-income areas of the world.
If you ever feel like you can’t stop eating sugar, you are responding precisely as programmed by natural selection. What was once an evolutionary advantage has a different effect today.
Several of California’s reservoirs were at less than one-third of their capacity in early December 2021.
Martha Conklin
As the risk of fires rises in areas once considered too wet to burn, it creates hazards for mountain communities and for downstream water supplies.
Dry conditions across the West follow a hot, dry year of record-setting wildfires in 2020. Communities were left with scenes like this, from California’s Creek Fire.
Amir Aghakouchak/University of California Irvine
Drought conditions are so bad, fish hatcheries are trucking their salmon to the ocean and ranchers are worried about having enough water for their livestock.
The California Aqueduct, which carries water more than 400 miles south from the Sierra Nevada, splits as it enters Southern California at the border of Kern and Los Angeles counties.
California DWR
Roger Bales, University of California, Merced and Brandi McKuin, University of California, Santa Cruz
Installing solar panels over California’s 4,000 miles of canals could generate less expensive, renewable energy, save water, fight climate change – and offer a solution for the thirsty American West.
The sequoias that live on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California are the largest trees in the world by volume.
Erin Donalson/EyeEm via Getty Images
Restoring western forests – thinning out small trees and dead wood – is an important strategy for reducing the risk of massive wildfires. But these projects aren’t fast, easy or cheap.