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Harvard Medical School professor and SFI external professor, Walter Fontana and colleagues have created Cellucidate, a new tool to help biologists uncover general principles about cellular signaling. Cellucidate would turn network diagrams of signaling pathways into living and breathing systems. Fontana mixed Kappa, a computer language “tuned to express basic interactions between proteins,” with a method called “coarse-graining” into computational models. By coarse-graining under Kappa’s rules, an automated compression is formed, filtering out permutations that have no bearing on the current model. The goals of Cellucidate include modeling and simulation to speed drug discovery and cure cancer. Fontana also helped found a company called Plectix BioSystems which provides a shared online space for scientists to use Cellucidate. Fontana adds, “Plectix wants to be the Facebook of proteins…where scientists will make models collaboratively.”

Warfare was sufficiently common and lethal among our ancestors to favor the evolution of what Sam Bowles, SFI Professor, calls parochial altruism, a predisposition to be cooperative towards group members and hostile towards outsiders. Biologists and economists have doubted that a genetic predisposition to behave altruistically (help others at a cost to oneself) could evolve (excepting the help extended to close genetic relatives). Skepticism among biologists arose primarily because most think that groups are not sufficiently different genetically to favor group selection (the most obvious evolutionary mechanism promoting altruism beyond the family). But both observation in natural settings and experiments (some of them by Bowles and his co authors) show that altruism is quite common among humans (much more so than in most other animals). In a series of recent papers Bowles shows that altruism could have evolved among humans as a result of the advantages that altruistic groups have in military and other competition with other groups.

Authors, including SFI External Professor Jessica Green, present a theoretical framework to describe stochastic, size-structured community assembly, and use this framework to make community-level ecological predictions. The model can be thought of as adding biological realism to Neutral Biodiversity Theory by incorporating size variation and growth dynamics, and allowing demographic rates to depend on the sizes of individuals.

Mark Buchanan, the science writer for Physics World, discusses the new field of “econophysics” which began at the Santa Fe Institute, a facility focused on innovative, high-risk, and inter-disciplinary research. Physicists are creating models of the economy and trying to help the future of markets and the economy.

We live in a post-Darwinian world, and it is no longer possible to conceive of life without some reference to Darwin's theories. But the world is more complex than Darwin supposed. Whereas an evolutionary perspective pervades all of biology, economics and politics, we are confronted by a range of post-Darwinian complexities and challenges that require a new and expanded set of ideas. Five short presentations by SFI faculty explore both the influence and the limitations of Darwin's thought on modern science, and introduce several of the ways the Santa Fe Institute has responded to and built upon Darwin's legacy.

To establish the Omidyar Fellows Program which aims to attract the brightest and most creative thinkers to spend two to three years as postdoctoral fellows at the Santa Fe Institute. Consistent with SFI's multidisciplinary approach, the fellowship program will draw scholars from across the social, physical and natural sciences with the common denominators being intense curiosity, creativity and a desire to delve deep into the major questions facing science and society.

A $15,000 grant from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation is helping SFI reach out to middle schoolers in Taos, N.M., says Irene Lee, who is principal investigator of SFI’s Project GUTS (“Growing Up Thinking Scientifically”) educational effort. Project GUTS aims to engage students in research projects that promote an understanding of complex systems and the value of computer modeling and simulation in scientific research.

"A Significant Upward Shift in Plant Species Optimum Elevation During the 20th Century" by SFI External Professor and former International Fellow Pablo Marquet and collaborators is featured in this week's issue of Science Magazine

Sign up to View a lecture by SFI President Geoffrey West at Imperial College, London, on his work developing a unified quantitative theory of biological and social structure and organization. Here he describes scaling -- whereby many of life’s most fundamental and complex phenomena scale with size in a surprisingly simple fashion.

Traditional computers shuffle information in the form of binary numbers, the digits 1 and 0, which are remembered by the "on" and "off" positions of tiny switches, or "bits", on the circuit boards. Quantum computers use atoms and subatomic particles as the switches that perform the memory and processing tasks. As the threat posed by internet viruses and hackers to people's personal computers increases, quantum cryptography could become a standard feature of desktop computers to ensure safe internet communication. (SFI External) Professor Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes this property of quantum computing has opened up another new possibility, that is of growing concern to internet users. His research has revealed a way of using quantum computing to keep personal information private. Currently, internet sites and search engines can keep large amounts of information about people's computer and search practices. "If you use what I am calling quantum private queries, it would allow you to ask a question of a search engine like Google, but keep your own information private. If they try to keep your information, you will know about it. It will allow computer users to know no one else is snooping on their information," said Professor Lloyd.

Irene Lee, Project GUTS' Principal Investigator, was one of seven women honored at a luncheon April 3, 2008.

The Albuquerque Journal reports that the pro-green, antinuke message that Mikhail Gorbachev is expected to deliver during a speech in Santa Fe next month will come perhaps at a fitting time for northern New Mexico. While Gorbachev prefers to deliver his remarks from notes jotted down on a notepad, an associate said environmentalism and nuclear disarmament -- both hot topics in the City Different -- will likely be themes of a lecture he'll give during an April 14 visit, which is a fundraiser for the Santa Fe Institute. "He's called for the abolition of nuclear weapons," said Matt Peterson, head of Global Green USA, the U.S. affiliate of Green Cross International, which Gorbachev founded in 1993.

Kirgistan's Pravda publishes a report listing Santa Fe Institute among the world's top higher education programs.

The discussion about privacy is changing as users take control over their own online data. While they spread their Web presence, these users are not looking for privacy, but for recognition as individuals -- whether by friends or vendors. This will eventually change the whole world of advertising. The current online-advertising model will become less effective, even as it gets increasingly sophisticated.... This approach (called behavioral targeting and already in service by ad networks that track users through so-called tracking cookies) undercuts traditional online publishers, who employ content to lure users and to sell adjacent ads....This does not mean that traditional online advertising will go away, just that it will become less effective. Value is being created in users' own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies -- like Facebook and Dopplr -- that know how to build and support online communities.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - EBay said on Tuesday it is cutting fees it charges people to offer items for sale and raising standards at the online auction website. In a move aimed at staving off increasing competition from the likes of Google and Craigslist, eBay is trimming fees it charges aspiring sellers by as much as half. This is the first time eBay has offered incentives and discounts to sellers since it was founded in 1995 by (Santa Fe Institute Trustee and) French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar.

As part of a gift by eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar, SFI needs to raise $2 Mn by October 1, 2009.

Middle schoolers interested in science, technology, engineering, and math are getting a special opportunity thanks to an SFI program offered through Santa Fe public schools.