News + Events

The Santa Fe Institute will be pursuing questions about general, universal principles of complex time with support from the James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF) through a five year, $2.5 million grant.

Recent advances in technology have allowed scientists to probe the molecular nature of life, analyzing thousands of genes at a time and recognizing patterns of gene interaction. In a recent paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, complexity scientist Samuel Scarpino and co-authors explore gene co-expression networks that have evolved to help plants withstand drought and cold.

Bali's famous rice terraces, when seen from above, look like colorful mosaics because some farmers plant synchronously, while others plant at different times. The resulting fractal patterns are rare for man-made systems and lead to optimal harvests without global planning.    

How we make decisions— or, rather, how neurons make decisions for us, is the subject of new research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. In the study, Bryan Daniels, Jessica Flack, and David Krakauer uncover a two-phase collective decision-making pattern which may suggest a general principle of collective computation.

SFI Postdocs wrap up a second 72 Hours of Science with a new paper, exploring record-setting trends, posted to the arXiv.

This volume pulls together 25 years worth of research that builds a case for universal, mathematical scaling laws and their similarities despite striking differences.

Linguistic conventions, such as the French tu-vous distinction, often signify social inequality. In new research, Sam Bowles and colleagues investigate why some such conventions fade over time while others persist as stubbornly as inequality itself.

In 2016, the postdoctoral fellows at the Santa Fe Institute set out with the goal of going from a novel research question to a publication in just 72 hours. As a result, 72h(S) produced a novel line of research into the dynamics of beneficial epidemics.

May 8-11, the SFI postdocs hunker down for an intense experiment in interdisciplinary collaboration. Their goal: to go from a new idea to a complete paper in just three days.

A long-term study of the Tsimane forger-farmers yields new insights into aging and the human life course.

May 3-5, 2017 at SFI, researchers looked for the ways to measure collective behavior across different systems.

Community detection is an important tool for scientists studying networks, but a new paper published in Science Advances calls into question the common practice of using metadata for ground truth validation.

According to a new paper published this week in PNAS, creating a quantitative and systematic understanding of how cities generate wealth and better living conditions for their residents would be a big step toward achieving the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations.

In a new paper published in the current issue of the American Journal of Political Science, SFI Omidyar Fellow Marion Dumas looks at 40 years of U.S. environmental laws to ask what impact litigious citizens have on the political bargaining process.

SFI science meetings highlight underlying commonalities with inventions in technology, biology, culture and economics.

Why salmon migrate in 'pulsing' patterns is the subject of a new paper published today in Animal Behavior.

In a new study, SFI Omidyar Fellow Eleanor Power analyzes the social benefit of religious participation in two South Indian communities. 

This week at SFI, researchers from a range of disciplines examine how violent radicalization occurs at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

SFI Omidyar Fellow Josh Grochow and collaborators make headway on decades-old mathematics problem.

The journal Chaos has announced that “Evaluating gambles using dynamics,” co-authored by SFI’s Murray Gell-Mann and Ole Peters, was the most-read paper of 2016.