News + Events

New work led by SFI researchers reconciles divergent methods used to analyze the scaling behavior of cities.

The walls of SFI’s Miller and Cowan campuses were recently adorned with an exhibition by acclaimed visual artist Greg Stimac.

In a recent essay at Aeon, a group of four SFI researchers (Doyne Farmer, Fotini Markopolou, Eric Beinhocker, and Steen Rasmussen) argue that if we study the co-evolution of social and physical technologies we can better respond to new threats to democracy.

What does it mean to grow old? Many fields have offered answers, but none of them provides a universal theory. According to former SFI Postdoc Jacopo Grilli (International Centre for Theoretical Physics), we understand the when but not the how of aging: when the components of an organism fail, but not the causes of these failures or if the process serves an evolutionary purpose. This February, a diverse international working group will meet at SFI to find a fresh take on the problem.

An NSF-funded research project is exploring the effects of network structure on wealth inequality. In February over 40 anthropologists, economists, and others will review their research so far and chart new directions.

For the tenth year running, the Santa Fe Institute has ranked among the world's top science and technology and interdisciplinary think tanks.

A new Scientific Reports paper puts an evolutionary twist on a classic question. Instead of asking why we get cancer, Leonardo Oña of Osnabrück University and Michael Lachmann of the Santa Fe Institute use signaling theory to explore how our bodies have evolved to keep us from getting more cancer.  

In this SFI Community Lecture, economist Rajiv Sethi shows the depths to which stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

In the few short months since Carrie Cowan arrived at SFI, she’s been immersed in the culture and in uncovering new ways to advance the Institute’s educational mission. But the moments that most stand out to SFI’s new Director for Education are all about the people.

New research by SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Artemy Kolchinsky and Bernat Corominas-Murtra presents an important distinction for information theory — copying vs. transforming. Watch the video explainer.

For something as ubiquitous in modern life as electrical power, few of us know much about the rules that govern power production, fees, or transmission. SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack, with colleagues from Boise State University and Duke University, are working to better understand them through a recently funded project called RTOGov (short for RTO Governance). Last fall, they shared what they've learned with the U.S. Congress.

In an op-ed for The Conversation, SFI External Professor Orit Peleg and her colleagues describe research that takes a close look at the structures that break-off swarms adopt to protect themselves from the elements.

This week at SFI, researchers take a quantitative look at an age-old question: to what extent is human history shaped by impersonal trends, big ideas, and great leaders?

SFI's David Krakauer and Cristopher Moore remember mathematician Reuben Hersh, who passed away January 3, 2020.

In an op-ed for Fast Company, External Professor James Evans (University of Chicago) and his colleagues demonstrate that when organizations and individuals succeed after failure they follow a distinct path.

What would happen if neural networks were explicitly trained to discard useless information, and how to tell them to do so, is the subject of recent research by SFI's Artemy Kolchinsky, Brendan Tracey, and David Wolpert.

A new model of how animals budget their energy sheds light on how they live and explains why they tend to evolve toward larger body sizes.

A special issue of Isis, compiled by SFI's Manfred Laubichler and his colleagues, takes stock of the growing field of computational history.