Public learns about NASA-funded center

More than 70 people learned about the research and education opportunities offered by UC Merced’s new Merced nanomaterials Center of Energy and Sensing during an open house earlier this month.

MACES, established earlier this year with a $5 million grant from NASA, is intended to benefit current and future students and contribute to NASA’s missions. The open house drew a diverse mix of participants, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members from colleges throughout the state, and high school teachers from Fresno, Clovis and Merced.

This event was designed to inform participants about the center’s research and educational programs and encourage them to participate in opportunities with MACES faculty members: Professor Jennifer Lu, the center’s director, and professors Sayantani Ghosh, Tao Ye, Anand Subramaniam, Vincent Tung and Min Hwan Lee.

Lu kicked off the event by providing an overview of the center’s goals and how its programs will contribute to NASA’s space missions, improve the quality of life on the planet, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Each MACES faculty member also presented a summary of his or her work, ranging from energy conversion and storage in space to biosensors that could be used for future long-duration space missions and potentially to improve medical diagnoses here on Earth.

NASA’s Dave Berger provided a brief summary of the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center and summer internships opportunities there, and encouraged students who are studying science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) to apply for internships at any of NASA’s 10 sites early in their college careers.

Ghosh, Lee and Petia Guergueiva, the STEM resource coordinator for UC Merced’s School of Natural Sciences, met with science teachers from Golden Valley, El Capitan and Merced high schools and the Center for Advanced Research and Technology program in Fresno.

Beginning in the spring, MACES faculty members and students will organize several events aimed toward high school students, including NASA field trips and dinners with scientists, and will design educational modules focusing on the scientific discovery process for high school teachers to include in their curricula.

Professor contributes to ‘Nature’ study

The basic structure of Earth’s ecosystems lasted for 300 million years but changed about 6,000 years ago, and humans are the most likely reason. A team of about 25 researchers from around the globe, including UC Merced Professor Jessica Blois, outlined that discovery in a paper published this month in the journal Nature.

“Over the past 10,000 years, we see rapid changes in natural communities,” said Blois, a professor in UC Merced’s School of Natural Sciences. “We really see the turning point happening about 6,000 years ago, and we think the changes were due to increasing human activity.”

There was a lot going on at that time, she said, including an increase in human populations around the world and the beginnings of agriculture. Many assume human impacts have only taken place since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1800s.

The researchers looked at how ecological communities are organized and how they change through time, which is going to be critical to predicting the effects of climate change.

Specifically, they looked at 359,896 unique pairs of plants and animals at 80 sites. While most pairs are randomly associated across sites, they wanted to see if any pairs were aggregated – living together – or segregated.

For the past 300 million years, most non-random species pairs were aggregated. But over the past 10,000 years – specifically about 6,000 years ago – that all changed. Before the shift, 64 percent of the pairs were aggregated; after it, 37 percent were, the paper points out.

While Blois doesn’t put a value judgment on change, she is concerned.

“Life has an amazing capacity to respond to change and adapt, but it appears that in just a short amount of time, we’ve disrupted that,” she said. “If species were aggregated because of some significant interactions and we’ve changed that, it could be harder to recover from.”

This story was originally published December 29, 2015 at 4:08 PM with the headline "Public learns about NASA-funded center."