At its core, Stanford is both a birthplace of new information and a marketplace of ideas, and The Daily plays a vital role in this academic enterprise.

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Some in the University’s administration have come to see Stanford’s cultural DNA as “high-risk.” To be fair, this comes in the context of a broader birth of the university incorporated, bringing changes to campuses across the country. But this raises special questions at Stanford - can the culture of a place simply be changed by fiat, and, if so, what happens to a University that loses the spirit that defined it through the course of its long ascendancy?

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The Stanford Portal, a shipping container that allows individuals to have face-to-face contact with others in distant portals, opened on Monday. The Portal uses immersive video and audio features to facilitate the long-distance conversations.

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In a statement released Monday, Stanford's Board of Trustees announced that the University will not be divesting from the fossil fuel industry. The announcement comes in response to a campaign on the issue by the student group Fossil Free Stanford.

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A total of 1,318 high school seniors received letters of acceptance to Stanford’s Class of 2020 on Friday. An additional 745 early action students were accepted in December. The 2,063 admits came from a pool of 43,997 applicants, the largest in Stanford's history. A further 3.6 percent of applicants were given a place on Stanford's waitlist.

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Stanford is announcing the launch of a new graduate scholars program and associated $750 million endowment. The Knight-Hennessy scholars program will be analogous to the Rhodes and Schwarzman scholarships, aiming to attract the world’s most talented graduate students to Stanford for studies across the University’s seven schools.

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The “digital humanities” is an increasingly popular field of research within humanities departments at Stanford and beyond. Yet what exactly is the digital humanities? To gain a better understanding of this approach to scholarship, The Stanford Daily sat down with Caroline Winterer, professor of history and director of The Stanford Humanities Center, whose recent research focuses on digital analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s correspondences.

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This fall, thousands of works in the Cantor Arts Center’s collection will be made available online for the first time. The Cantor staff has worked for five years to produce the internet database of its collections, which will provide access to the entire collection for the Stanford community and general public.

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In the wake of last Saturday’s earthquake in Nepal, Stanford students are teaming up to help fundraise for relief efforts.

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Alfred Delena ’15 was selected as a 2015 Truman Scholar. Delena represents both Stanford and the state of New Mexico in the 2015 cohort of scholars.

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Two Stanford professors were selected for the inaugural cohort of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. Ian Morris of the Classics Department and Shahzad Bashir of the Religious Studies Department will receive $200,000 as a part of the fellowship, which is designed to honor outstanding scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

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In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, the Stanford Board of Trustees announced that the University would not divest from certain companies operating in Israel. The statement responds to a request from Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a student group that hoped Stanford would divest from a list of companies that it claimed profited from human rights abuses in Palestine.

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Professor Mark Cullen will serve as the first director of the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences, the School of Medicine announced on Monday. Cullen will oversee research funding, educational programs and data-sharing efforts.

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Stanford researchers have developed a new aluminum ion battery that could charge a phone in less than a minute. According to the researchers, the battery would be an affordable and safe alternative to current, commercial batteries.

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A recent uptick in reports of academic dishonesty during Winter Quarter prompted an all-faculty email from Provost John Etchemendy Ph.D ’82. In the email, Etchemendy cited a large, introductory course, where as many as 20 percent of students are suspected of violating the Honor Code. According to sources familiar with the situation, the emailed referred to CS106A and B.

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In a ranking released on Tuesday, U.S. News rated Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) as the best business school in the country.

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Last week, the first groups of Stanford students viewed the admissions files they had requested under a FERPA provision. A staff member accompanied students for the duration of their 20-minute appointments to ensure that no photos of the records were taken.

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Patent trolls may actually serve a valuable role in innovation, according to Stanford political scientist Stephen Haber. Haber, the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, found that patent trolls serve as an important bridge between inventors and manufacturers.

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The University Registrar’s office has begun responding to FERPA requests for admissions records associated with last month’s email from The Fountain Hopper. Students who made FERPA requests will be able to access copies of their common application, along with their high school transcript, on AXESS

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Scientists at Stanford’s SLAC National Laboratory have gotten an unprecedented glimpse of a chemical bond being born. The researchers used an X-ray laser to show a rare transition state where two atoms begin to bond.

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Stanford, in conjunction with the Sports for Social Change program, is hosting a talented group of young soccer coaches committed to social impact.

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Carl Djerassi, Stanford chemistry professor emeritus and “father” of the birth control pill, died on Friday. He was 91.

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Stanford came in second for funds raised by American universities in 2014. Stanford raised $929 million, only below Harvard’s $1.16 billion.

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