Parkour!
While you were busy stubbing your toe against a chair in your own house, the robodogs in Chelsea Finn’s lab were becoming parkour champs. They can jump across gaps, shimmy through narrow spaces, and flatten themselves to crawl under obstacles. And now they can do it all autonomously, bringing researchers one step closer to creating rescue robots that can efficiently navigate chaotic terrain after earthquakes, wildfires, or other disasters. Along with researchers at Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute, Finn, an assistant professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, developed the algorithm that makes the robots’ acrobatics possible. In Finn’s lab, the robodogs attempt to move forward and are rewarded based on how well they did. Through this process, called reinforcement learning (RL), the algorithm learns how to approach a new challenge and to select the best skills to navigate the situation. Finn’s process uses no real-world reference data, so it’s less computationally expensive—and faster—than most existing RL systems.
Understanding the Israel-Hamas war.
On October 13, Larry Diamond, ’73, MA ’78, PhD ’80, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, hosted a discussion with experts in Iranian studies, Israel studies, and others on the regional and global implications of the Hamas attack on Israel and the emerging conflict in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Janine Zacharia, a communication lecturer who reported on Israel, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy for close to two decades, has been speaking on news shows about the significance of President Biden’s visit to Israel, the opening of an evacuation corridor for people in Gaza, and the reaction to the war on U.S. college campuses. “I think as a country we need to be able to talk about these issues in a way that is a little bit more sophisticated,” she said recently on MSNBC. “It’s heartbreaking for me, as someone who works with students here, to see what’s happening at Stanford, at Harvard, at Penn, at Rutgers, at UCLA, at Berkeley—everywhere. And so I hope that as campuses, we can start to do a little better in these conversations.” Leaders of high-profile universities, meanwhile, are grappling with whether and how to issue institutional statements on this and other news events. Do they comment, which poses the risks of blowback and of stifling academic freedom? Or do they remain silent—which could be interpreted as a statement in its own right? The Wall Street Journal recently delved into these questions, examining recent communications by leaders including Harvard president Claudine Gay, ’92, as well as Stanford president Richard Saller and provost Jenny Martinez.
Predicting prematurity.
About one in 10 babies born in the United States is delivered prematurely (i.e., more than three weeks ahead of their due date), but doctors can’t reliably predict who will be an early bird. In a new study, researchers gave smartwatch-like devices to 1,083 pregnant women and used a machine learning algorithm to sift through the data on their sleep and physical activity. The algorithm built a pregnancy “clock” of typical sleep and activity patterns over the course of a pregnancy. As the women’s pregnancies progressed, their sleep typically became more disrupted and they became less physically active. Some women, however, experienced those changes earlier in their pregnancy than others—and the study found that the former were more likely to deliver prematurely.
While more research is needed to understand the implications of these findings in preventing premature births, senior author Nima Aghaeepour, an associate professor of pediatrics and of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine, said there’s little risk of harm in advising women to maintain good sleep habits. “If we can use sleep and physical activity to modulate biology in the right direction, it could be a great intervention for reducing the rate of preterm birth.”
Family reunion.
Photo: H. Taghap
Last weekend, more than 8,000 alumni and their guests returned to campus for Reunion Homecoming. The Farm overflowed with parties, panels, Classes Without Quizzes, and general Cardinal merriment as alumni reconnected with the university and one another.
Lead to the wrong conclusion.
Every day in Bangladesh, three-wheeled vehicles give people about 200 million rides, and they’re rapidly being converted from natural gas to battery electric power. It sounds like an environmentalist’s dream, but it’s creating a pollution nightmare. When the lead-acid batteries used in the vehicles give out, they’re supposed to go to reputable battery recyclers. Instead—thanks to taxes, corruption, and pricey pollution-control requirements, among other factors—many batteries end up in a network of informal recyclers who use coal to smelt battery parts in open-air pits, exposing millions of people to lead. “Lead is a toxin like no other,” said Stephen Luby, a professor of infectious diseases. “It is the element on the periodic table that does most damage to human health.” Luby and Erica Plambeck, MS ’98, PhD ’00, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and at the Graduate School of Business, have also found that misinformation and counterfeiting have motivated battery manufacturers to make cheap batteries that fail quickly, exacerbating the pollution problem. Luby and Plambeck are partnering with manufacturers and technologists to provide long-lasting batteries to the region.
But wait, there’s more.
When Deborah Claymon, ’92, competed on Jeopardy!, her less-than-instant reflexes—not lack of knowledge—ultimately became her downfall.
Do you lie awake at night wondering whether moon rocks got their magnetism from the satellite’s ancient magnetic field or from their spacecraft ride to Earth? Some Stanford scientists did—until recently, after finding that space travel didn’t affect the rocks’ magnetism.
Earlier this month, 53 Stanford students gathered on Alcatraz Island to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day with chants, dances, and speeches for the 2023 Sunrise Ceremony.
A new study is leading scientists to theorize that an imbalance in the number or function of inhibitory neurons compared with excitatory neurons might be at least partly responsible for autism spectrum disorder and epilepsy.
Saturday’s football game against UCLA was . . . a thing that happened. But it followed the Cardinal’s luckiest Friday the 13th ever. Coach Troy Taylor and his team rebounded from a 0–29 deficit at halftime, winning 46–43 against Colorado in the biggest comeback in school history.
You know what’s going even better? Women’s soccer. They notched their 14th win of the season last weekend, 2–0 against the University of Oregon.
Debilitating muscle frailty affects about 30 percent of people over 80. Now, Stanford has shown that a drug administered to mice can induce the regeneration of damaged motor neurons, nerves that relay messages from the spinal cord to muscles. The drug might one day be used to prevent age- or disease-related muscle loss or to hasten recovery from injury.
“We’re going to go into some hard math. Some people get really scared about that. I don’t want them to; I want them to feel welcomed and happy.” Chris Piech, ’10, MA ’11, PhD ’16, an assistant professor of computer science, shares the playlists (“Class Upbeat” and “Fresh”) that set the tone for his CS classes.
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