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    Hurricane Helene Deaths Will Continue for Years, Study Suggests

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    Research on hundreds of tropical storms finds that mortality keeps rising for more than a decade afterward, for reasons you might not expect.Over the past week, the official death toll from Hurricane Helene has surpassed 100 as the vortex creeping inland from Florida submerged homes and swept away cars. But the full weight of lost lives will be realized only years from now — and it could number in the thousands.A paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday lays out the hidden toll of tropical storms in the continental United States. Looking at 501 events from 1930 to 2015, researchers found that the average tropical storm resulted in an additional 7,000 to 11,000 deaths over the 15 years that followed.Overall during the study period, tropical storms killed more people than automobile crashes, infectious diseases and combat for U.S. soldiers. It’s such a big number — especially compared with the 24 direct deaths caused by hurricanes on average, according to federal statistics — that the authors spent years checking the math to make sure they were right.“The scale of these results is dramatically different from what we expected,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University, who conducted the study with Rachel Young, the Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.The pair used a technique that has also provided a more complete understanding of “excess deaths” caused by Covid-19 and heat waves. It works by looking at typical mortality patterns and isolating anomalies that could have been caused only by the variable under study — in this case, a sizable storm.Previously, researchers examined deaths and hospitalizations after hurricanes over much shorter periods. One study published in Nature found elevated hospitalizations among older Medicaid patients in the week after a storm. Another, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, associated higher death rates with U.S. counties hit by cyclones. A study in The Lancet found that across 14 countries, cyclones led to a 6 percent bump in mortality in the ensuing two weeks.Deaths from tropical storms in the U.S. have been spiking Fatalities connected to storms that struck as many as 15 years ago – measured as the number of deaths above what would otherwise be expected – are rising faster as storms increase in frequency.

    Source: Solomon Hsiang and Rachel YoungBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Aims to Tie Harris Critically to Her Father, a Professor of Marxist Economics

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      Early in Tuesday’s debate, former President Donald J. Trump attacked Vice President Kamala Harris by tying her to her father.“She’s a Marxist — everybody knows she’s a Marxist,” Mr. Trump said. “Her father is a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.”Ms. Harris has repeatedly made clear that she supports capitalism. But her father, Donald J. Harris, a renowned economist who has been a fleeting figure in her life, has been described as a “Marxist scholar.”Marxism refers to the political, social and economic theories of Karl Marx, practiced as socialism or communism.Dr. Harris was the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics department and a prominent critic of mainstream economic theory from the left. The Stanford Daily, the university’s student newspaper, reporting in 1976, said that there was some opposition to granting him tenure because he was “too charismatic, a pied piper leading students astray from neo-Classical economics.”Ms. Harris has received the backing of more than 80 chief executives, some of whom have called her “pro-business.”Dr. Harris is still a professor emeritus at Stanford and turned 86 last month, the day after Ms. Harris spoke at the Democratic National Convention. He did not appear alongside her that evening, but she did pay a rare homage to him in her speech, saying that his encouragement had helped inspire her.“From my earliest years,” Ms. Harris said then, “he taught me to be fearless.” More

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      Leonard Hayflick, Who Discovered Why No One Lives Forever, Dies at 96

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      A biomedical researcher, he found that normal cells can divide only a certain number of times before they age — which, he said, explained aging on a cellular level.Leonard Hayflick, a biomedical researcher who discovered that normal cells can divide only a certain number of times — setting a limit on the human life span and frustrating would-be-immortalists everywhere — died on Aug. 1 at his home in Sea Ranch, Calif. He was 96.His son, Joel Hayflick, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Like many great scientific findings, Dr. Hayflick’s came somewhat by accident. As a young scientist in the early 1960s at the Wistar Institute, a research organization at the University of Pennsylvania, he was trying to develop healthy embryonic cell lines in order to study whether viruses can cause certain types of cancer.He and a colleague, Paul Moorhead, soon noticed that somatic — that is, nonreproductive — cells went through a phase of division, splitting between 40 and 60 times, before lapsing into what he called senescence.As senescent cells accumulate, he posited, the body itself begins to age and decline. The only cells that do not go into senescence, he added, are cancer cells.As a result of this cellular clock, he said, no amount of diet or exercise or genetic tweaking will push the human species past a life span of about 125 years.This finding, which the Nobel-winning virologist Macfarlane Burnet later called the Hayflick limit, ran counter to everything scientists believed about cells and aging — especially the thesis that cells themselves are immortal, and that aging is a result of external causes, like disease, diet and solar radiation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stanford Reports on Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Bias Show Extent of Divide

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      One report documented antisemitic threats. The other, anti-Muslim threats. Both signaled that there may be little room for agreement.Stanford released on Thursday dueling reports on campus culture — one on antisemitism and the other on anti-Muslim bias — that revealed mirroring images of campus life in recent months that may be impossible to reconcile.One report found that antisemitism has been pervasive at the university in both overt and subtle ways, while the other stated that the school had stifled free speech among pro-Palestinian students and faculty. They were emblematic of the rift between Jewish and Muslim groups on campus, and showed that any kind of accord between the two groups and the university were distant.The reports are among the first outcomes of universities’s reckonings with their handling of the flurry of protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and pro-Israel counterprotests, over the past academic year. As students across the nation marched on campus, set up encampments and, in some cases, got arrested, universities were met with the difficult challenge of balancing students’ right to free speech and campus safety. At Stanford, 13 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested a few weeks ago after barricading themselves in the president’s office. The report on antisemitism — by a university subcommittee on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, consisting of faculty, students and an alumnus — found that acts of antisemitism have ranged from an anonymous threat on social media against a student journalist who had written about antisemitism to what students said was intimidation in the classroom and residence halls.“Antisemitism exists today on the Stanford campus in ways that are widespread and pernicious,” the group wrote in the report. “We learned of instances where antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stanford Becomes Latest School to Reinstate Test Scores Requirement

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      The university joins a small but growing number of elite colleges requiring SAT or ACT scores in applications once again.Stanford University announced Friday that it was reinstating the requirement for standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions, becoming the latest of a small but growing number of elite colleges to go back to the practice after abandoning it during the pandemic.The change will take effect in fall 2025, and students applying to enroll in fall 2026 and beyond will need to provide SAT or ACT scores in their applications. Standardized test scores will remain optional for those applying this fall to enroll next year.Other selective schools that in recent months have reverted to requiring those test scores include Harvard, Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown, Purdue, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin.The test score requirement fell out of favor during the pandemic, as test dates got canceled during lockdown and as critics raised concerns over standardized tests fueling inequality. About 2,000 colleges around the country made test scores optional in applications, at least temporarily, after the pandemic hit. In a statement explaining the move, Stanford officials said that a faculty committee on undergraduate admission had found that test scores were “an important predictor of academic performance at Stanford.” But they said the scores would be “one part of a holistic review” of applicants that will also consider factors like classroom achievement, backgrounds and whether a student has worked jobs or taken on family responsibilities.Stanford’s reasoning was largely in line with that of other universities that made similar decisions. Many have cited recent research showing that test scores help predict students’ college grades, and their chances of graduation and post-college success. Grades are not as accurate a predictor, researchers say, because of issues like grade inflation that make it difficult to assess a student’s work. Studies have also shown that standardized tests can help universities find lower-income students and students of color who will thrive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stanford’s New President Is Jonathan Levin, Dean of Business School

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      Dr. Levin faces the challenge of guiding the university through politically fraught times.Stanford University’s next president will be Jonathan Levin, an economist who currently serves as dean of the graduate business school and whose association with the university dates back to his undergraduate days in the 1990s.Dr. Levin’s selection, announced on Thursday, was based partly on his deep understanding of the university’s culture, the school said.His appointment is also viewed as a stabilizing force, as Stanford faces turmoil stemming from protests over the Israel-Hamas war, as well as controversy over a predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned as president last summer amid questions about the quality of scientific research that was conducted in labs he supervised.Jerry Yang, the technology entrepreneur who is the chair of Stanford’s board of trustees, said that the selection committee chose Dr. Levin, 51, as someone who could chart a course for the university during these politically fraught times.The trustees held dozens of listening sessions, Mr. Yang said. “People wanted someone with a very distinguished academic record, somebody who has a deep familiarity with Stanford, understanding our spirit and culture,” he said on Thursday. “And they wanted someone with deep integrity.”In choosing Dr. Levin, who serves on a White House advisory panel on science and technology, Stanford’s 20-member search committee also picked someone steeped in the world of academia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Misinformation Defense Worked in 2020, Up to a Point, Study Finds

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      Nearly 68 million Americans still visited untrustworthy websites 1.5 billion times in a month, according to Stanford researchers, causing concerns for 2024.Not long after misinformation plagued the 2016 election, journalists and content moderators scrambled to turn Americans away from untrustworthy websites before the 2020 vote.A new study suggests that, to some extent, their efforts succeeded.When Americans went to the polls in 2020, a far smaller portion had visited websites containing false and misleading narratives compared with four years earlier, according to researchers at Stanford. Although the number of such sites ballooned, the average visits among those people dropped, along with the time spent on each site.Efforts to educate people about the risk of misinformation after 2016, including content labels and media literacy training, most likely contributed to the decline, the researchers found. Their study was published on Thursday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.“I am optimistic that the majority of the population is increasingly resilient to misinformation on the web,” said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and the lead author of the report. “We’re getting better and better at distinguishing really problematic, bad, harmful information from what’s reliable or entertainment.”“I am optimistic that the majority of the population is increasingly resilient to misinformation on the web,” said Jeff Hancock, the lead author of the Stanford report.Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesStill, nearly 68 million people in the United States checked out websites that were not credible, visiting 1.5 billion times in a month in 2020, the researchers estimated. That included domains that are now defunct, such as theantimedia.com and obamawatcher.com. Some people in the study visited some of those sites hundreds of times.As the 2024 election approaches, the researchers worry that misinformation is evolving and splintering. Beyond web browsers, many people are exposed to conspiracy theories and extremism simply by scrolling through mobile apps such as TikTok. More dangerous content has shifted onto encrypted messaging apps with difficult-to-trace private channels, such as Telegram or WhatsApp.The boom in generative artificial intelligence, the technology behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot, has also raised alarms about deceptive images and mass-produced falsehoods.The Stanford researchers said that even limited or concentrated exposure to misinformation could have serious consequences. Baseless claims of election fraud incited a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More than two years later, congressional hearings, criminal trials and defamation court cases are still addressing what happened.The Stanford researchers monitored the online activity of 1,151 adults from Oct. 2 through Nov. 9, 2020, and found that 26.2 percent visited at least one of 1,796 unreliable websites. They noted that the time frame did not include the postelection period when baseless claims of voter fraud were especially pronounced.That was down from an earlier, separate report that found that 44.3 percent of adults visited at least one of 490 problematic domains in 2016.The shrinking audience may have been influenced by attempts, including by social media companies, to mitigate misinformation, according to the researchers. They noted that 5.6 percent of the visits to untrustworthy sites in 2020 originated from Facebook, down from 15.1 percent in 2016. Email also played a smaller role in sending users to such sites in 2020.Other researchers have highlighted more ways to limit the lure of misinformation, especially around elections. The Bipartisan Policy Center suggested in a report this week that states adopt direct-to-voter texts and emails that offer vetted information.Social media companies should also do more to discourage performative outrage and so-called groupthink on their platforms — behavior that can fortify extreme subcultures and intensify polarization, said Yini Zhang, an assistant communication professor at the University at Buffalo.Professor Zhang, who published a study this month about QAnon, said tech companies should instead encourage more moderate engagement, even by renaming “like” buttons to something like “respect.”“For regular social media users, what we can do is dial back on the tribal instincts, to try to be more introspective and say: ‘I’m not going to take the bait. I’m not going to pile on my opponent,’” she said.A QAnon flag on a vehicle headed to a pro-Trump rally in October. Yini Zhang, a University of Buffalo professor who published a study about QAnon, said social media companies should encourage users to “dial back on the tribal instincts.”Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesWith next year’s presidential election looming, researchers said they are concerned about populations known to be vulnerable to misinformation, such as older people, conservatives and people who do not speak English.More than 37 percent of people older than 65 visited misinformation sites in 2020 — a far higher rate than younger groups but an improvement from 56 percent in 2016, according to the Stanford report. In 2020, 36 percent of people who supported President Donald J. Trump in the election visited at least one misinformation site, compared with nearly 18 percent of people who supported Joseph R. Biden Jr. The participants also completed a survey that included questions about their preferred candidate.Mr. Hancock said that misinformation should be taken seriously, but that its scale should not be exaggerated. The Stanford study, he said, showed that the news consumed by most Americans was not misinformation but that certain groups of people were most likely to be targeted. Treating conspiracy theories and false narratives as an ever-present, wide-reaching threat could erode the public’s trust in legitimate news sources, he said.“I still think there’s a problem, but I think it’s one that we’re dealing with and that we’re also recognizing doesn’t affect most people most of the time,” Mr. Hancock said. “If we are teaching our citizens to be skeptical of everything, then trust is undermined in all the things that we care about.” More

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      A Stanford Student Mocked the Federalist Society. It Jeopardized His Graduation.

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      The Stanford student sent a satirical flier that drew a complaint from the conservative group. The university then placed a hold on his diploma.It was the final day of classes at Stanford Law School, May 27, when Nicholas Wallace said he was blindsided by a message from one of the deans informing him that his graduation was in jeopardy for potential misconduct.His offense: sending an email flier to fellow law students in January that he pretended was from the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative and libertarian group with a chapter at the law school.The satirical flier promoted a discussion about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, featuring Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The title of the mock event: “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”The chapter’s leaders were not amused. They filed a complaint on March 27 with the university, which said in a message to Mr. Wallace that it wasn’t until May 22 that the complainants had asked the administration to pursue the matter.“I was astounded,” Mr. Wallace, 32, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe that without any more than this letter of concern they placed my graduation and everything I’ve worked for for the last three years, they’ve placed that under threat.”Mr. Wallace’s predicament drew national attention from both free speech groups and conservatives. It served as another example of the intense debate over political speech on college campuses in America.In response to questions on Wednesday, a spokesman for Stanford University said in an email that Mr. Wallace would be allowed to graduate after all after administrators consulted with the university’s legal counsel, who concluded the matter involved issues of protected speech.“In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent,” said the spokesman, E.J. Miranda. “The complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible, and the respondent and complainant have been informed that case law supports that the email is protected speech.”Mr. Miranda said that the university would also review its procedures for placing holds on student diplomas in judicial cases close to graduation.The president of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday night.Mr. Hawley, who received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, was widely criticized for objecting to the certification of the presidential election results. Mr. Paxton has drawn scrutiny for his appearance at a rally in support of Donald J. Trump in Washington on the day of the siege.Representatives for Mr. Hawley and Mr. Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday night.Grabbing attention itself was Mr. Wallace’s satirical flier, which he said he had emailed to a Listserv forum for law school students on Jan. 25, nearly three weeks after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.The flier said that the event was being presented by the Federalist Society on Jan. 6.“Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,” the flier said, offering Grubhub coupons to the first 30 students who R.S.V.P.’d for the fictitious program. “Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”Two days after the satirical flier was sent by Mr. Wallace, it was the focus of a fact check article by USA Today, which reported that the email was a form of satire.In a complaint to the university, unidentified officers of the Federalist Society chapter said that Mr. Wallace’s email had caused significant harm and had led other organizations to cancel their events with the group.“Wallace defamed the student group, its officers, Senator Josh Hawley, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,” the complaint said. “Wallace, impersonating the Stanford Federalist Society, wrote on the flyer that ‘Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,’ insinuating that the student group was encouraging and hosting a riot. He also wrote that Attorney General Paxton advocates for ‘overturn[ing] the results of a free and fair election’ by ‘calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol.’ And he wrote that Senator Hawley believes that violent insurrections are justified.”The names of the complainants were redacted from the complaint, which was posted online on Monday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group working to defend free speech on college campuses. Mr. Wallace had sought the group’s help.“By instituting an investigation and placing a hold on Wallace’s degree days before his graduation, Stanford betrays its legal and moral commitments to respect its students’ expressive rights,” the group said in a letter on Tuesday to one of the law school’s deans.The flap drew the notice of Slate magazine. The writer of that article, Mark Joseph Stern, was the featured speaker in a conversation about the Federalist Society that Mr. Wallace said he had organized about a month after he sent the satirical email.Mr. Wallace’s cause was also taken up by Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University.“Mocking an ideologically-based group can’t be made a basis for denying academic privileges in any open society worthy of respect,” Mr. Tribe wrote on Twitter. “If accurate, this report shows Stanford Law School to be unworthy of treatment as an academic institution.”George T. Conway III, one of the founders of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, also rallied behind Mr. Wallace.“As someone who been involved with the Federalist Society for over 35 years, I agree that this is totally ridiculous,” Mr. Conway said on Twitter, responding to Mr. Tribe.Mr. Wallace, who is from Ann Arbor, Mich., and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, said that he is supposed to take the bar exam this summer in his home state and then start a job with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C.He said that he would not have been able to take the bar exam without his law school diploma, which he will receive on June 12. More