News + Events

New research by SFI Professor David Wolpert considers how a set of interacting subsystems affects the Second Law of Thermodynamics for the system they comprise.

Until now, systems far from thermal equilibrium couldn’t be analyzed with conventional thermodynamics and statistical physics. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, David Wolpert presents a new hybrid formalism to overcome these limitations.

One characteristic shared by most human civilzations in the last 10,000 years was a reliance on innovations in collective information processing to grow beyond a certain size and scale, according to research published in Nature Communications by Santa Fe Institute Professor David Wolpert, External Professor Tim Kohler (Washington State University), and other SFI collaborators.

It takes patience and plenty of good-will to transform a dynamic and intensive in-person summer program into a virtual experience that offers genuine and impactful connections. With the support of SFI Professor and Program Director Chris Kempes and Education Program Manager Carla Shedivy, ten students around the U.S. and 11 SFI researcher-mentors proved up to the task.

Living organisms aren’t the only things that evolve over time. Cultural practices change, too, and in recent years social scientists have taken a keen interest in understanding this cultural evolution. A new experiment used drum-beats to investigate the role that environment plays on cultural shifts, confirming that different environments do indeed give rise to different cultural patterns.

How to reach emissions reduction targets while simultaneously growing New Mexico’s economy is the subject of a new report from a Santa Fe Institute workshop, which describes opportunities for New Mexico to fuel job growth and take a leading role in the Southwest region as it moves toward decarbonization.

In a special presentation for the online ScienceWriters2020 conference in October, SFI’s Joshua Garland and Mirta Galesic will present the first large-scale analysis of tens of millions of instances of hate and counter-hate speech on Twitter.

If voters gravitate toward the center of the political spectrum, why are the parties drifting farther apart? At the latest meeting of SFI’s Virtual Science Club on Sept. 16, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, an SFI Omidyar Fellow and Peters Hurst Scholar, showed 40 attendees how dynamic mathematical models can help us make sense of this and other puzzles of politics and voting

Research News Briefs highlight new studies from the SFI community published in the last quarter. The following briefs appeared in SFI's Fall 2020 Parallax newsletter. 

A new video mini-series, “Andromeda Strain and the Meaning of Life,” will explore major questions around astrobiology and life’s origins through imaginative conversations between six leading researchers in the field.

SFI External Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya of Los Alamos National Laboratory has been named a 2020 Laboratory Fellow. He is one of seven LANL scientists and engineers to receive this recognition for their scientific leadership.

SFI celebrates recent achievements of members of our research network. 

SFI Professor Sidney Redner has been awarded the 2021 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize from the American Physical Society.

Former Omidyar Fellow Paul Hooper and long-time SFI collaborators Cody Ross (Max Planck Institute) and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (UC Davis) are among co-authors on a new paper that proposes an index for measuring "reproductive skew" across animal species.

The European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) honored SFI External Professor Joshua Epstein (New York University) with its most prestigious award — The Rosaria Conte Award for Outstanding Social Simulation. A pioneer and world leader in agent-based modeling, Epstein was among the first scientists to use bottom-up simulation to replicate the statistical macrostructures seen in complex social systems. 

September 2020 brought a landmark discovery for astrobiology — the detection of a chemical compound in the clouds of Venus that is often associated with the presence of life. Though no SFI researchers were on the team that published the recent discovery of phosphine, one SFI scientist first forecast the possibility of Venusian life more than 50 years earlier.

In their book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, former SFI External Professor Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West unpack the ease with which misinformation has leached into every corner of society and call for a healthy dose of skepticism in science, media, and everyday life.

This year, the annual postdocs’ gathering is a retreat not from SFI’s day-to-day calm, but to a recreation of it. Sheltered by strict safety protocols, the 'Pandemic Pod' is taking place in person.

Susan Carter, SFI’s Director of Research Development, was named a Charter Fellow by the National Organization of Research Development Professionals.

This week, Jennifer Dunne was named a Fellow of the Network Science Society.