News + Events

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.

Actors presented select scenes from Marin Gazzaniga’s play exploring deeply held assumptions about religion and belief at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on May 9.

During a ceremony Wednesday evening, May 4, the Santa Fe Institute awarded Melanie McKinley its Prize for Outstanding Teacher, and recognized 13 Santa Fe-area high school seniors for scientific excellence.

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.

An April Working Group explores how ecological systems synchronize, like in the case of Magicicada swarms.

Cormac McCarthy, the celebrated American novelist and a senior fellow at SFI, is publishing his first-ever non-fiction science essay in Nautilus magazine.

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.

Michael Kearns presented an SFI Community Lecture on machine learning and social norms at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on April 4. Watch his talk here.

New books by SFI Authors, highlighted in the Spring 2017 Parallax, include From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Scale, and 43 Visions for Complexity.

Starting this week, a new online tutorial teaches quantitative approaches to understanding game-like interactions between multiple decision makers.

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.