News + Events
The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
'Pedigree is not destiny' when it comes to scholarly success
A new analysis of academic productivity finds researchers' current working environments better predict their future success than the prestige of their doctoral training.
Toward a New Understanding of Aging, Adaptation, and the Arrow of Time
While time and age in standard dynamical systems are treated as simple clocks that run at a constant rate, the human experience of age is measured by consequences. In this talk on Tuesday, May 21 at 7:30 p.m., physicist Jean Carlson will illustrate the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time through examples taken from her research and focus areas of a five-year Santa Fe Institute research theme.
Save the date, change the world: InterPlanetary 2019
The 2019 InterPlanetary Festival takes place June 14-16 in Santa Fe, NM.
Search and decide: ACtioN meeting explores how human search strategies are evolving
An April 25 SFI ACtioN meeting explores how organizations can benefit from research into people’s modern search and decision-making processes.
A living inspiration? Working group to investigate cells as computers
The working group “Thermodynamic and Computational Efficiency in Cellular Chemical Reaction Networks” meets at SFI April 23-24.
Group decisions: When more information isn't necessarily better
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.
Three SFI faculty elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
SFI's Sam Bowles, Mercedes Pascual, and Daniel Schrag have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
At last, acknowledging royal women's political power
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.
The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-time world
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.
SFI Press publishes "Emerging Syntheses in Science"
A new edition of Emerging Syntheses in Science, edited by SFI co-founder David Pines and published through SFI Press, offers a fresh window into SFI's founding meetings, including never-before-published transcripts and essays.
Death as a system collapse
A working group, “Hallmarks of Biological Failure,” meets to discuss the patterns of mortality, biological failure, and system collapse.
Are you with me? New model explains origins of empathy
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.
The cost of computation
A new review by David Wolpert collects recent advances in understanding the thermodynamics of computation that are grounded in computer science and physics.
Video: Social Animals – How Evolution Shapes Human Social Behavior
SFI External Professor Laura Fortunato presented a Community Lecture at The Lensic on Tuesday, April 16, 2019, on the challenges and opportunities from using studies of social animals to inform our understanding of how human social behavior evolves.
Book review: Viruses as Complex Adaptive Systems
What are viruses? Are they even alive? SFI external professors Ricard Solé and Santiago F. Elena tackle these and other questions through a complex systems approach in their new book.
It’s complicated: Simple interactions can have unpredictable consequences
The Economist highlights how a complex systems approach to economics adds critical nuance to traditional approaches to the field.
Online romance is local, but not all locales are the same
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.
Working group: Thinking along the spectrum
Working group meets to explore how and why people categorize phenomena into overly simplistic distinctions.
Complexity postdocs to convene fifth joint conference
Research jams, intercontinental collaborations, and lightning talks — the Postdocs in Complexity Conference is back!