Patty Guerra

It might seem that an airfield filled with old planes is a strange place to talk about the future of space flight. But Jared Isaacman, the administrator of NASA, said the Castle Air Museum was the perfect setting to talk about what's ahead.

Isaacman visited the former Air Force base last week to tour the planes and talk with students, including a contingent of more than 30 from UC Merced. The group included undergraduate and graduate students, members of the university's first nanosatellite team, and faculty conducting NASA-supported research.

Imagine driving down a road in an electric vehicle with no charging stations in sight. Do you want only an estimate of how many more miles your car can go before the battery dies?

As electric vehicles proliferate throughout much of the world, it's never been more important to know precisely how much charge is left in their batteries.

Wildfire is reshaping the forests of California's Sierra Nevada and affecting the water those forests supply to downstream users.

A paper published in Hydrology and Earth System Science reports that the effect of wildfire on potential runoff from the state's main water-supply watersheds has increased in the period 1985-2023, most markedly since 2019.

UC Merced is no stranger to solar panels. The campus, built to be sustainable from the beginning, is home to thousands of them, and they provide a good chunk of the electricity that powers the university.

But one very special panel was recently installed on the top of the Science and Engineering 2 Building.

The panel was crafted by Tandem PV, a Fremont company that uses perovskite-silicon tandem technology to make high-efficiency solar panels that integrate into existing manufacturing supply chains.

This is part of a series of profiles of new UC Merced Bobcats enrolled for the fall 2026 semester.

Anthony Savala Alvarez comes to UC Merced this fall with several accomplishments under his belt: He graduated high school with a grade point average of 4.1, earned the California Seal of Biliteracy, and took part in several sports, including varsity soccer, cross country and track and field.

Step into Ross Greer’s lab — gingerly, because there’s a makeshift racetrack on the floor — and you will see multiple projects aimed at making autonomous vehicles smarter and safer.

And these projects are getting global recognition.

Key points:

• Researchers found that heat waves are a critical enabler and driver of wildfire-burned areas across the western U.S.

• The findings suggest that heat waves contribute not only to increased flammability, but to longer burn periods and increased lightning.

• Burned area in forests during the summer more than doubled between 2001 and 2024. Most of this recent increase - 64 percent - occurred during heat waves.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine calls for the U.S. Department of Energy to develop innovative technology and infrastructure at the intersection of the nation's water and energy systems.

The country's energy and water systems are profoundly interconnected, and disruptions can cascade rapidly across both, says the report from the Committee on Enabling DOE Regional Energy-Water Technology Pilots.