News + Events

For the last 150 years, economic theory has depended on assumptions that consumers and investors think hyper-rationally. It's elegant but not realistic, argues SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur in an essay published recently in Nature Physics Reviews.

Crossing disciplines, collecting new data in unconventional ways, and establishing a common language have long been hallmarks of scientific culture at the Santa Fe Institute. Now these same practices are spurring a "golden age" in social science, to which SFI researchers have made outsized contributions over the past 12 years, according to a perspective piece published February 2 in PNAS.

A new project will analyze around 500,000 congressional speeches from U.S. Senate and House proceedings to create a larger picture of the use of boundary rhetoric over nearly the last century of American political discourse.

Experimentalists are often tempted to sample their study systems as densely as possible. A new paper by SFI collaborators helps practitioners avoid over-sampling systems where local mixing or diffusion can occur.

Despite strides in family-leave offerings, and men taking a greater role in parenting, women in academia still experience about a 20% drop in productivity after having a child, while their male counterparts generally do not, according to new research by SFI and CU Boulder. 

In an op-ed for The Conversation, SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack explains how the deregulated Texas power system actually combines deregulation and regulation.

A study led by SFI External Professor Ricard Solé shows how a new class of Turing patterns work, using synthetic biology to create them from scratch in the lab.

A review paper published in this week's Evolutionary Anthropology seeks to reconcile competing approaches in the sciences of human behavior.

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the pace of automation. SFI External Professor Doyne Farmer and colleagues determined that low-wage workers face a double-whammy of being more likely to lose their jobs to automation and less likely to have the skills to switch to newly created jobs.

In his 2020 Darwin Lecture, “Cancer Evolution: From Cells to Species and Back,” SFI External Professor Michael Hochberg, who is Distinguished Research Director with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Montpellier, France, drew on insights from network science and his own expertise in disease modeling to provide an overview of how evolution has shaped cancer into the deadly killer it is today.

In 2016, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik and colleagues published a paper in the inaugural issue of Nature Energy showing that when it comes to electric vehicles, “range anxiety” is unfounded. Trancik’s paper has now been selected by Nature Energy Chief Editor Nicky Dean as one of his favorites from the past five years.

Nature Communications has selected SFI research into information and sociopolitical development for its Social Sciences Focus.

Rajiv Sethi and Brendan O’Flaherty argue that successful police reform begins when we grasp the complex systems that underly current departments, in their latest op-ed in The Bridge.

In a Journal of Statistical Mechanics paper published in July 2020, Paul Krapivsky and SFI Professor Sidney Redner report an idealized model for the optimal strategy to park in the very best spot that’s closest to your destination. The paper was selected by Physics World as one of  "The 10 quirkiest physics stories of 2020."

SFI External Professor Melanie Moses argues, in her recent op-ed for Nautilus, how algorithmic thinking might hold the key to a far more successful rollout.

What does ecological thinking look like? For SFI Science Board Member Simon A. Levin, adopting an ecological perspective involves thinking about the interplay between interdependence and adaptation. His op-ed appears in the Winter 2020 issue of The Bridge.

In the latest issue of The Bridge, SFI Science Board member Susan Fitzpatrick describes how efficiency can lead to fragility, and advocates for using complex systems thinking to inform our engineered social systems.

A virtual working group, “Origins of Life: The Possible and the Actual,” brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers from February 1-5.

Science is slowly shifting away from equations toward algorithms, writes W. Brian Arthur in an essay published by the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. Thinking algorithmically, he says, gives researchers a way to study ideas like unpredictability and emergence.

What types of infrastructure improvements will it take to speed the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs)? In a Nature Energy paper published January 21, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik and her co-authors at MIT report a new methodology designed to identify which locations for vehicle charging stations could be prioritized