The Ukraine situation.
At his press conference last week, President Biden offered a blunt assessment of Russia’s intentions in Ukraine, predicting that an invasion was the most likely outcome. “This will be the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II,” said Biden, promising a strong international response should his concerns bear out. So why is President Putin risking international upheaval by targeting a neighbor Russia already attacked in 2014 when it seized Crimea? In part, it may be brinkmanship aimed at increasing Russian influence in the region at the expense of the West, said Steven Pifer, ’76, a fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a former ambassador to Ukraine. “The Kremlin undoubtedly hopes that just the threat of a new attack on Ukraine will prompt Kyiv [the Ukrainian capital city] and the West to make concessions,” he told the Stanford News Service. “Mr. Putin also wants NATO to rethink policies, such as enlargement and the deployment of relatively small battlegroups on the territory of Poland and the Baltic states.”
But Putin’s biggest concern may lie with an audience closer to home—the Russian people. “A Ukraine that charts its own course, consolidates its democracy and enacts reforms that realize the full potential of its economy poses a nightmare for the Kremlin,” Pifer said. “That Ukraine would cause Russians to ask why they cannot have the same political voice as Ukrainian citizens—and perhaps even challenge Mr. Putin’s authoritarianism.”
Paychecks and balances.
She probably doesn’t know why your dream employee ghosted you last year (unless you used Comic Sans somewhere), but LinkedIn’s chief economist, Karin Kimbrough, ’90, can offer a unique perspective on the shifting balance of power in America’s employment landscape. “It’s as if that social contract of work is being rewritten, and right now the worker’s holding the pen,” she told 60 Minutes. While Kimbrough reports that a new job is filled on LinkedIn every 15 seconds, more than 20 million people have quit in the past six months, so “companies are eager to hire, but workers are being very choosy.”
Hoping to help them be even choosier is Sarah Bana, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, part of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. After identifying job skill terms like “cybersecurity” and “Java,” Bana fed job postings into a natural language processing model, which was then able to correctly predict salaries 87 percent of the time. “Currently there’s not a lot of clarity around a path to higher earnings,” said Bana, who would like to turn her findings into a web-based app. “Tools like these could help job seekers improve their job prospects.” Ah, yes, but will the app be able to recognize Comic Sans?
The hidden power of Prozac.
Stanford pathologist Paul Mischel has spent years studying glioblastoma, a particularly deadly type of brain tumor. As Mischel and postdoctoral scholar Junfeng Bi searched for a Goldilocks drug that could both make it through the protective blood-brain barrier and target particularly dangerous cancer enzymes, they stumbled upon a familiar pill: “We nearly fell off our chairs when we saw that fluoxetine, or Prozac, achieves both of these goals,” Mischel told Stanford Medicine’s Scope blog. They gave Prozac to mice with human glioblastomas, and sure enough, “the tumors melted away and didn’t come back. It’s something we’ve never seen before.” Furthermore, upon studying medical insurance claims, they found that patients who took Prozac while being treated for glioblastomas lived longer than the control group. “This is a drug that is sitting on the shelf of every pharmacy, and it’s known to be safe,” said Mischel. “We feel this is poised to be tested in patients quite soon."
The squishy middle (not yours).
Photo: Weijiang Zhou/Stanford University
We live in a battery-powered world, and it sure would be nice if they lasted longer, especially when all the outlets are taken at Starbucks. One thing that stands between us and next-gen lithium metal batteries is the liquid between the battery’s electrodes—known as the electrolyte. It corrodes the surface of the metal anodes, producing a layer of gunk called the solid-electrolyte interphase, or SEI. Using revolutionary technology called cryogenic electron microscopy, SLAC researchers have made the first high-res images of squishy SEI. The results suggest that the right electrolyte may minimize the gunk and improve battery performance. “There are no other technologies that can look at this interface between the electrode and the electrolyte with such high resolution,” said Zewen Zhang, MS ’19, a Stanford PhD student who led the experiments.
Timing is everything.
In a survey of nearly 28,000 U.S. transgender adults, Stanford Medical School researchers found that gender-affirming hormone therapy in adolescence often leads to better mental health outcomes later in life. When compared with members of a control group who had wanted but never received hormone therapy, respondents who started the treatment in adolescence had lower odds of experiencing severe psychological distress in the past month and lower odds of suicidal ideation in the past year. “This study is particularly relevant now,” said lead author Jack Turban, a postdoctoral scholar in pediatric and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford Medicine. “Many state legislatures are introducing bills that would outlaw this kind of care for transgender youth.”
Made for each other.
Not all antibodies are equal, says Taia Wang, assistant professor of infectious diseases and of microbiology and immunology. Her work has shown that the more closely an antibody complements a pathogen, physically and electrochemically speaking, the better it can grab onto the invader in all the right places. These particularly well-matched antibodies are called neutralizing antibodies, and if you aren’t producing a robust number of the ones tailored to SARS-CoV-2 early in a COVID-19 infection, you are more likely to need hospitalization later on. Wang’s team revealed that patients who would go on to develop severe COVID had a deficiency of a sugar called fucose on certain antibodies and a high level of receptors for those deficient antibodies. The researchers also showed that people who had received two doses of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine had similar antibody profiles to the COVID patients who did not need hospitalization. Their work could lead to a simple test that enables doctors to predict which patients are likely to experience severe illness and to care for them accordingly.
But wait, there’s more.
Former university president John Hennessy and his collaborators have been named this year’s winners of the Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering, awarded for the advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering, for their invention of RISC chips. The microprocessors streamline and accelerate data processing. Today, about 99 percent of new computer chips use the RISC architecture.
Sara Bei Hall, ’05, a seven-time All-American, set the U.S. women’s half-marathon record 15 years and two days after her husband and coach, Ryan Hall, ’05, set the record for U.S. men in the same race.
Can teamwork really make the dream work? Yes, if teams modulate their intellectual diversity, says Amir Goldberg, associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Goldberg and his team analyzed messages on Slack and found that the most successful teams were cognitively divergent when coming up with new ideas but well aligned and coordinated during execution.
If it bears a Stanford logo, John Schwarz, ’60, probably has it somewhere in his house. He’s spent the past 60 years amassing a collection of Stanford memorabilia more than 1,000 items strong, including beer mugs, bobbleheads and nearly every Big Game program ever published.
Ousseni Bouda, ’23, grew up in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, where his love of soccer overcame a long list of apparent lacks. He and his friends had no shoes, no fields and often no ball. Now the Stanford forward is joining the San Jose Earthquakes as the eighth pick of the 2022 MLS SuperDraft. “It's a dream come true,” Bouda, a junior, said. “I'm now a professional soccer player.”
Scientists at the School of Medicine have developed ultra-rapid genome sequencing methods that can diagnose rare genetic diseases in an average of eight hours. “Rapid” genome sequencing usually takes a few weeks. In the process, they set the first Guinness World Record for genome sequencing. It’s no White Plaza world mooning record, but we’ll take it.
Summer Moore Batte, ’99, is the editor of Stanfordmag.org and the Loop. Email her at summerm@stanford.edu.
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