News + Events

A new study in Nature, co-authored by SFI External Professor Brian Enquist and others at the University of Arizona, provides the first quantitative assessment of how environmental policies on deforestation, along with forest fires and drought, have impacted the diversity of plants and animals in the Amazon.

Much of modern sleep research has focused on the hormones, cells, and enzymes that regulate how we sleep, and what goes wrong when we can't sleep. But “all of this leaves unanswered the more fundamental question of why we need to sleep in the first place. What, in fact, is sleep’s function?” ask SFI's Van Savage and Geoffrey West in an essay for Aeon magazine.

Archaeologists have long had a dating problem. The radiocarbon analysis typically used to reconstruct past human demographic changes relies on a method easily skewed by radiocarbon calibration curves and measurement uncertainty. And there’s never been a statistical fix that works — until now.

A new book by SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt provides readers with a solid understanding of the classical models of cities and complex networks, delving into key features of urban areas.

A team of researchers associated with the Evolution of Human Languages program is using a novel technique to comb through the data and to reconstruct major branches in the linguistic tree.

Anthropologist Douglas White, who was widely regarded for his research into human relationships as dynamic, complex networks, passed away on August 22, 2021. 

To solve our most intractable and pressing scientific problems, humanity needs the best possible science to innovate solutions. The best possible science is science that is open, reproducible, replicable, transparent, and inclusive, says Open Science advocate and SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Helena Miton.

This summer, participants in SFI's education programs joined newly appointed external faculty member Marco Buongiorno Nardelli to create and perform a unique piece of music based on features of complex systems.

In a new opinion piece for Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, SFI External Professor Jürgen Jost tours some of the major philosophical and scientific debates around consciousness, including whether a human or animal brain automatically becomes conscious when it crosses a certain threshold of complexity.

In an editorial for Nautilus, SFI President David Krakauer looks at the double-edged sword of doubt. Drawing insights from the history of science, he explores how to tell the difference between the scientific and conspiratorial skepticism that define our present experience.

“If we want to save Earth, we have to do the math,” writes SFI Professor Cris Moore in a new op-ed for the Santa Fe New Mexican. 

From small committees to national elections, group decision-making can be complicated — and it may not always settle on the best choice. A new mathematical framework shows that’s partly because some members of the group do research on their own, and others take their cues from the people around them.

Stanford linguist Merritt Ruhlen, a long-time SFI collaborator who co-founded the Evolution of Human Languages project, passed away on January 29, 2021.

In an essay for the online magazine SAPIENS, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Helena Miton argues that errors and innovations are central to the story of human culture.

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Helena Miton received Central European University’s 2021 award for “Best Dissertation.” 

On average, people in larger cities are better off economically. But a new study published in the Royal Society Interface builds on previous research that says, that’s not necessarily true for the individual city-dweller. It turns out, bigger cities also produce more income inequality.

What if life evolved not just once, but multiple times independently? 

In a new paper, published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, Santa Fe Institute researchers Chris Kempes and David Krakauer argue that in order to recognize life’s full range of forms, we must develop a new theoretical frame. 

The Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS) has been a core feature of summers at SFI for a quarter-century. This year, in response to the ongoing pandemic, the 26th GWCSS was condensed into two intensive and productive days online, and students completed a homework problem centered around a question of contemporary significance.

Dispatches from ATLANTIS is a new creative editorial series from the Santa Fe Institute's InterPlanetary Project.

The newest volume from SFI Press provides researchers—both novice and experienced—who study the human past the necessary background, discussion of modeling techniques and traps, references, and algorithms to use agent-based modeling in their own work.