News + Events

On March 31, five speakers from epidemiology and economics discussed strategies for both public health and economic recovery, and answered questions from the SFI community.

SFI External Professor Joshua Epstein states the contagion of fear is as significant to the current pandemic as the novel coronavirus itself.

By using transmission to our advantage, we can eliminate coronavirus through citizen-based medicine.

Abrupt environmental changes, known as regime shifts, are the subject of new research in which shows how small environmental changes trigger slow evolutionary processes that eventually precipitate collapse.

Shifting from carbon-emitting energy sources to renewable ones will be an essential part of addressing climate change, but the path to a renewable power grid is uncharted. A February 26-28 working group explores how New Mexico might best approach the transition to renewable energy sources, and what lessons could be useful for other regions.

In a new issue of PLOS One dedicated to the “science of stories," SFI's Mirta Galesic and her fellow guest editors present emerging computational approaches that could add a new dimension to narrative analysis.

NPR’s David Brancaccio is hosting a free, virtual book club around the CORE team's introductory econ textbook.

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

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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?

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.

Whether we decide to take out that insurance policy, buy Bitcoin, or switch jobs, many economic decisions boil down to a fundamental gamble about how to maximize our wealth over time. How we understand these decisions is the subject of a new perspective piece in Nature Physics that aims to correct a foundational mistake in economic theory.

In a paper published in Economics Letters, SFI's Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin propose a novel twist on the widely used Gini coefficient—a workhorse statistical measure for gauging the gap between haves and have-nots.