News + Events

A May working group brings critics of urban scaling theory to engage in respectful dialogue with SFI scientists in the Social Reactors project.

The 2019 InterPlanetary Festival takes place June 14-16 in Santa Fe, NM. 

Modular — or cliquey — group structure isolates the flow of communication between individuals, which might seem counterproductive to survival. But for some animal groups, more information isn't necessarily better, according to new SFI research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Across the globe in a variety of societies, royal women found ways to advance the issues they cared about and advocate for the people important to them as detailed in a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Research.

Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that Markov processes, widely used to model complex systems, must unfold over a larger space than previously assumed.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute and the Santa Fe Institute have developed a new model to explain the evolutionary origins of empathy and other related phenomena, such as emotional contagion and contagious yawning. The model suggests that the origin of a broad range of empathetic responses lies in cognitive simulation.

A "big dating" study by External Professors Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman reveals that geographic distance within the U.S. is the strongest driver of instances when two users message each other.

A new experiment in the "science of sync" show how complex behaviors emerge from a simple network. The work could eventually inspire interventions for heart arrhythmias, or technologies for managing modern infrastructure.

When only two things interact, the outcome is usually easily to predict. But what happens when you add a third — or fourth, or fifth, or more — component to the mix? The effects of such higher-order interactions can be difficult to forecast, and are the subject of a working group that meets this week at SFI.

New research by External Professor John Pepper offers an intriguing theory for how cancer evolves in people with obesity, diabetes, and chronic inflammation: By providing an over-abundance of energy to cells, these diseases might super-charge their growth and cause them to become cancerous.

New SFI research explores the unintended consequences of removing aboriginal people from their lands, with big implications for a more sustainable future.

The Santa Fe Institute again has ranked among the world's top science and technology and transdisciplinary think tanks.

A major new report takes a complex systems perspective on obesity, undernutrition, and climate change. The authors, including External Professor Ross Hammond, identify connected drivers for the three pandemics and make practical recommendations for both policy and bottom-up social change.

New SFI research challenges a popular conception of how machine learning algorithms “think” about certain tasks.

One of the first studies to examine how climate is influencing "functional traits" in forest communities on a global scale finds evidence of major changes. 

A new paper published in the journal Entropy shows how tools from information theory, a branch of complexity science, can help decipher ice cores by quickly homing in on portions of the data that require further investigation. 

An opinion piece in Trends in Ecology and Evolution introduces real-world complexity to social dilemmas by accounting for the way individuals modify and adapt to the environments that surround them.

An SFI Working Group meets to explore the big picture on viruses, from infections of single cells to epidemics among populations.

An SFI workshop explores the evolutionary consequences of developmental bias — the tendency of organisms to evolve some phenotypes more readily than others.

A study co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Jacopo Grilli sheds new light on a long-standing question about what triggers cell division.