News + Events

With the rapid global spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the Santa Fe Institute has suspended all public events and scientific meetings. Check here for live updates.

SFI's President David Krakauer announces the Institute's suspension of visitor-related programs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

What would life on Earth be were it not for the domestication of plants and animals? An SFI working group, "Re-evaluating the Origins and Trajectories of Domestication," running March 9-11, explores "the nature of relationships between human groups and lots of different plants and animals."

Event Cancelled In this SFI Community Lecture on March 24, Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life, will guide us through approaches aimed at developing a new theory for understanding life.

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.

The walls of SFI’s Miller and Cowan campuses were recently adorned with an exhibition by acclaimed visual artist Greg Stimac.

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.

What does it mean to grow old? Many fields have offered answers, but none of them provides a universal theory. According to former SFI Postdoc Jacopo Grilli (International Centre for Theoretical Physics), we understand the when but not the how of aging: when the components of an organism fail, but not the causes of these failures or if the process serves an evolutionary purpose. This February, a diverse international working group will meet at SFI to find a fresh take on the problem.

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.

For the tenth year running, the Santa Fe Institute has ranked among the world's top science and technology and interdisciplinary think tanks.

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.  

In this SFI Community Lecture, economist Rajiv Sethi shows the depths to which stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

In the few short months since Carrie Cowan arrived at SFI, she’s been immersed in the culture and in uncovering new ways to advance the Institute’s educational mission. But the moments that most stand out to SFI’s new Director for Education are all about the people.

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.

For something as ubiquitous in modern life as electrical power, few of us know much about the rules that govern power production, fees, or transmission. SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack, with colleagues from Boise State University and Duke University, are working to better understand them through a recently funded project called RTOGov (short for RTO Governance). Last fall, they shared what they've learned with the U.S. Congress.