News + Events

In a test of the limits of scientific collaboration, 15 postdocs holed up in a home in the New Mexico foothills recently for three days and nights of intense scientific research. Their goal: produce a novel research paper in just 72 hours.

The economic impact of a new invention depends on its novelty and its conventionality, according to new research by SFI's Hyejin Youn and co-authors.

A new article co-authored by a number of SFI-affiliated researchers explores the psychological barriers that drive our distinct lack of “foresight intelligence” regarding climate change and our failure to take mitigating steps.

In Quantitative Finance, SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner and colleagues suggest that a tax on interbank loans scaled to the risk each transaction adds to the system would more effectively limit financial systemic risk than proposed "one size fits all" risk taxes.

Humans aren't the only species that farms; leafcutter ants, termites, and some beetles grow their own food. A working group met recently at SFI to explore the evolution of agriculture in insects and humans.

Deploying ideas and tools from complexity science in the financial sector would go a long way toward stabilizing global financial markets, according to a group of scientists writing today in Science. 

A collaboration of international researchers, including four SFI scientists, has been awarded $8 million to extend our understanding of evolution.

Upper and lower bounds on the sizes of bacteria and the physiological tradeoffs that constrain these size limits are explored in a new paper co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Chris Kempes.

A new analysis shows how tree ring data can help examine the social and demographic movements of ancient peoples. 

Harold Morowitz, a leading figure in shaping the scientific and popular understanding of the chemical origins of life on Earth, passed away March 22 in Fairfax, Va.

Whooping cough is on the rise in the US, and the adoption of a new vaccine in the 1990s is part of the explanation. Two former SFI Omidyar Fellows propose a hybrid vaccination protocol they say could slash cases by 95 percent.

Researchers met at SFI recently to make progress on the Artificial Long House Valley model, an agent-based model that is shedding light on human responses to environmental stress.

In a recent paper, SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne and colleagues present their Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars concept, which models changes to an island's socioecosystem dynamics.

This week a group of researchers, diverse even by SFI standards, have converged in Santa Fe to address the complexity of the rise of pertussis and other reemerging infectious diseases.

In a new paper, SFI professor Michael Lachmann and colleagues explore the roots of human genetic variation by comparing modern DNA to an ancient sample.

Do urban scaling relationships apply to the old cities of Europe, with their unique development patterns and multiple cycles of boom and bust, or are they an aberration on the urban landscape?

Psychologists and anthropologists convene at SFI this week to try to figure out what to do about what’s called the WEIRD problem (social science studies of subjects with Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic backgrounds).

Media artists, composers, and artist-programmers join SFI scientists this week to discuss new ways to represent complex data.

This week at SFI a working group investigates an organizing principle at the heart of ecology.

Understanding groupings, or “modules,” is a key problem in network theory.