Stanford Humanities and Sciences • 6th September 2024

Sleep experts share strategies to minimize jet lag’s effects on college athlete performance and health

The cost of air travel isn’t always obvious. When budgeting for a flight, we often consider ticket prices and the time spent traveling, but there’s another important expense to consider—the loss of quality sleep due to jet lag. College athletes routinely travel out of state to attend games and competitions. But the recent realignment of major college athletic conferences, including the departure of all but two colleges from the Pac-12 Conference, means that many athletes will make more cross-cou...

Stanford University • 4th September 2024

A majority of plant diversity hotspots are outside protected areas

It is hard to protect something if you don’t know where it is. Yet many people who study and want to safeguard native plants are faced with this exact problem. There are roughly 340,000 species of plants with water transporting tissues, called vascular plants. People are most familiar with a tiny subset of vascular plants, such as trees, agricultural crops, and flowering plants for the products, food, and beauty they provide. Yet all vascular plants play important roles in maintaining ecosystem...

Stanford University • 12th June 2024

Dennis Sun’s mission to make statistics more relatable

If you poked your head into the classroom of Stanford statistician Dennis Sun, you might be surprised by what you see. On one day, you might observe students tossing a beach ball-sized inflatable globe back and forth. On another day, you might see students circling their birth dates on a calendar, performing a Coke versus Pepsi taste test, or counting the clicks of a Geiger counter as it detects radiation. These activities may seem outlandish, but they are tangible examples of ways we can measur...

Stanford Humanities and Sciences • 15th November 2023

Study reveals how cultural factors influence chess move choice

What influences the choices we make, and what role does the behavior of others have on these choices? These questions underlie many aspects of human behavior, including the products we buy, fashion trends, and even the breed of pet we choose as our companion.

Now, a new Stanford study that used population and statistical models to analyze the frequency of specific moves in 3.45 million chess games helps reveal the factors that influence chess players’ decisions. The researchers’ analysis of che...

Stanford University • 1st November 2023

Study reveals location of starfish’s head

If you put a hat on a starfish, where would you put it? On the center of the starfish? Or on the point of an arm and, if so, which one? The question is silly, but it gets at serious questions in the fields of zoology and developmental biology that have perplexed veteran scientists and schoolchildren in introductory biology classes alike: Where is the head on a starfish? And how does their body layout relate to ours? Now, a new Stanford study that used genetic and molecular tools to map out the bo...

Stanford Humanities and Sciences • 27th September 2023

Biologist Tadashi Fukami named new faculty director of Jasper Ridge

Tadashi “Tad” Fukami, professor of biology in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and professor of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, has been named the new faculty director of Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. He began his term Sept. 1.A hallmark of Fukami’s research is his use of elegantly simple, often small-scale, experiments to better understand complex species interactions, large-scale ecosystem processes, and theories of ecology. His studies fo...

Stanford University • 10th August 2023

Bioengineered tool unmasks cancer cells

Cancer cells can evade the body’s immune defenses by exploiting a normally helpful and ubiquitous group of molecules known as mucins. Now, Stanford researchers have engineered a biomolecule that removes mucins specifically from cancer cells – a discovery that could play a significant role in future therapies for cancer.Mucins are sugar-coated proteins whose primary function is to defend the body against physical insults and pathogens. But cancer cells can co-opt mucins to aid their survival. Cut...

Stanford University • 10th July 2023

New genealogy method helps fill gaps in African American ancestry

Family trees, photo albums, and grandparents are often the go-to sources of information for people curious to know who their relatives were. Genetic ancestry is also a useful tool, but these measurements typically provide data on percentages of different populations in a person’s ancestry, not on specific people. Now, a new study led by researchers from Stanford and the University of Southern California introduces a new way to think about genetic ancestry, revealing information that approximates...

Stanford University • 20th June 2023

Study explores climate change impacts on seagrass meadows

Hidden beneath the waves of coastal waters lies an important member of the marine food chain – seagrasses. These marine meadows are in many ways the unsung heroes of the ocean, benefiting humans and the planet by producing oxygen, removing carbon dioxide from the air, and providing food and habitat for marine life. But these submerged savannahs may be in danger of disappearing, according to a new Stanford study that modeled the distribution of seagrass species around the world at two different t...

Stanford University • 1st May 2023

Study examines biases and coverage gaps in biodiversity data

In the race to document the species on Earth before they go extinct, researchers and citizen scientists have assembled billions of records. Most records either come from physical specimens in a museum or digital field observations, but both are useful for detecting shifts in the number and abundance of species in an area. However, a new Stanford study has found that both record types are flawed, and the degree to which they are riddled with coverage gaps and biases depends on the kind of dataset...

Stanford Humanities and Sciences • 24th February 2023

Q&A: Paul R. Ehrlich on his life’s work

Most scientists have an area of expertise; Paul R. Ehrlich has many. In a career spanning more than 60 years, Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Senior Fellow, Emeritus, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment has authored or co-authored more than 40 books and 1,200 papers on topics as diverse as co-evolution in butterflies and flowering plants, jaw size in humans, and overpopulation.

At Stanford, Ehrlich founded...

Stanford University • 14th December 2022

Frogs in space

Using tiny trackable pants and a “frog spa,” a Stanford University-led team has conducted the first known comparative study of how male and female amphibians navigate their surroundings.The research, co-led by Stanford biologists Andrius Pašukonis and Lauren O’Connell, tested two hypotheses for sex differences in spatial skills in field studies of three species of poison frogs in Ecuador and French Guiana.Their findings challenge a long-standing explanation for why males tend to have better spat...

Stanford Humanities and Sciences • 7th December 2022

Harumi Befu, professor emeritus of anthropology, dies at 92

Harumi Befu, a professor emeritus of anthropology in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences who challenged and exposed stereotypes about Japanese people and their culture, died Aug. 4. He was 92.

A pioneer in his field, Befu was instrumental in establishing Japanese studies at Stanford. He made a profound and enduring impact on his field and on the university community. Students and colleagues remember him as a gifted and selfless mentor, and their pages of remembrances recounting Befu’s...

Stanford Humanities and Sciences • 21st September 2022

Stanford launches new data science major

People produce about 2.5 quintillion—that is 2.5 with 17 zeros after it—bytes of data every day worldwide, according to a 2017 survey. Now that governments, organizations, and businesses have access to larger quantities and more kinds of data than ever before, data scientists are increasingly sought after to help mine datasets for valuable insights that can inform scientific discovery, decision-making, and policy.Anticipating this increasing need for data scientists, Stanford’s School of Humanit...

Stanford University • 18th July 2022

Stanford professor of music unravels centuries-old authorship mystery

The 15th-century French composer and singer Josquin des Prez, or “Josquin,” as he is commonly known, achieved the Renaissance equivalent of rock star status. Despite his fame, many details of Josquin’s life and career are hazy, and a big mystery of early music is how many of the several hundred musical compositions attributed to Josquin were actually written by him, according to Stanford musicologist Jesse Rodin.Rodin, associate professor of music in the School of Humanities and Sciences, recent...

Stanford University • 10th March 2022

Diversity in the discipline of history

Diverse teams are often associated with rapid discovery, yet few studies have examined whether and to what extent diversity in demographics, such as an individual’s gender and race, leads to new ideas and knowledge. “These questions are part of a longstanding discussion in the research community concerning who creates knowledge and the knowledge produced,” said Londa Schiebinger, the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S).Schiebinger a...

Stanford Humanities and Sciences • 12th January 2022

Lerone A. Martin on what we know—and don’t know—about Martin Luther King, Jr. and why access to information about him is more important than ever

On the third Monday in January, a federal holiday in the United States honors Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s life and contributions. Many people mark this day by reading and discussing King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered at the March on Washington in 1963. Others remember him by doing acts of service and volunteering for their local community.

Yet much of what we know about King—his famous speeches and the importance he placed on acts of service—barely begins to scratch...

Stanford University • 8th November 2021

Physicist and engineer Theodore Geballe dies

Theodore “Ted” H. Geballe, the Theodore and Sydney Rosenberg Professor in Applied Physics, Emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S) and professor emeritus of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering, died on Oct. 24. He was 101.A condensed matter physicist, Geballe studied superconductivity, a phenomenon whereby electrons flow without resistance, and how temperature affects the properties of semiconductors such as silicon and germanium.His work helped define...

Stanford University • 1st September 2021

Anti-predator gene expression in wild radishes

Lions, bears and other clawed creatures tend to top lists of nature’s most protective parents, but a new study has found that plants can also go to impressive lengths to protect their young.In a new study, published Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford researchers show that wild radish plants turn on different anti-predator genes during key phases of their lives in response to predation from caterpillars. Moreover, the plants can also pass these “on-demand” de...

Stanford University • 30th July 2021

Psychology Professor Albert Bandura dead at 95

Albert “Al” Bandura, the David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology, Emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S), whose theory of social learning revealed the importance of observing and modeling behaviors, died peacefully in his sleep in his Stanford home on July 26. He was 95.Bandura is internationally recognized as one of the world’s most influential social psychologists for his groundbreaking research on the importance of learning by observing others. In a 2002...

Stanford Humanities and Sciences • 11th June 2021

Attractive and repulsive forces between two multitasking molecules help assemble neural circuits in mice, Stanford study finds

Multitasking molecules may be the key to solving the riddle of how the brain makes trillions of specifically coded connections between the brain cells known as neurons.

In mice, two molecules that stud cell surfaces can create attractive or repulsive forces between the brain cells they’re displayed on, a new Stanford University study has found. By attracting or repelling other brain cells questing for neural connections, the magnet-like molecules called teneurin-3 and latrophilin-2 play an impo...

Stanford University • 11th March 2021

Growing neurons gain an edge by making connections

A little competition is never a bad thing, especially when it comes to fledging neurons growing in the brain, finds a new Stanford University study.In a first of its kind study, researchers led by Stanford biologist Liqun Luo used genetic experiments and computer models to shed light on two important steps of brain development in young mice: the growth of branching extensions on the bodies of neurons, called dendrites, and the connections that dendrites make with other neurons. Like biological a...

Stanford Medicine: Scope Blog • 10th January 2020

Forgiving others to help improve your health

Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die, my partner often says. In some ways this isn't far from the truth. As a Stanford Magazine story explains, letting go of past hurts and vengeful feelings caused by others (or even yourself) can benefit your mental and physical health.


Fred Luskin, PhD, has been studying forgiveness and how it affects human health for decades. As he explains in the story by Charity Ferreira, when a past hurt is unresolved, thinkin...

Stanford Medicine: Scope Blog • 3rd December 2019

Discussing death: Teaching clinicians how to broach tough topics with patients

People sometimes assume physicians either have the ability to talk to patients about difficult subjects -- or they don't. Actually, it's an ability that everyone can learn and then hone, palliative care expert Stephanie Harman, MD, told me.


"These are inherently teachable skills," Harman said. "How do we teach someone to recognize emotion and respond to it? How do we teach someone to strip away all the medical jargon and give a really clear headline of what's happening, and then pause and giv...