News + Events

A statistical technique that sorts out when changes to words’ pronunciations most likely occurred offers a renewed opportunity to trace words and languages back to their earliest common ancestor or ancestors.

A new book co-authored by SFI External Professor D. Eric Smith adopts an evolutionary game theory framework in which individual types and interactions are mapped to evolutionary fitness as a game played among agents in the population.

SFI Omidyar Fellow Eric Libby and co-author William Ratcliff explore how early multicellular life might have persisted amidst the evolutionary tug-of-war between single-celled and multi-celled living arrangements.

A quantitative investigation of the roles played by academic institutions' prestige in faculty hiring reveals a "closed doctoral ecosystem" that negatively affect a field’s ideas diversity, growth, and inventiveness.

SFI Professor Sam Bowles and collaborator Monique Borgerhoff Mulder recently held an invitation-only workshop at SFI to investigate the drivers of wealth inequality in human societies, including our own.

Several researchers at SFI and Arizona State University have begun a long-term collaboration to identify and measure the commonalities across various forms of human social organization, from bands of hunter-gatherers to urbanites of today's megacities.

New research led by Paul Hooper, a former SFI Omidyar Fellow now at Emory University, explores the evolutionary implications of food sharing across generations in Amazonian forager-farmer societies.

Geoffrey West's essay "A theoretical physicist's journey from strings and quarks to cells and whales" is among Physical Biology's top papers of 2014.

During an SFI Community Lecture January 14 in Santa Fe, Stanford linguist Daniel Jurafsky explored the stunningly complex language of food and what it tells us about our culture and society. Watch it now.

In a recent paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert and co-author James Bono reveal a way to get rich without doing any work at all.

SFI's David Pines and co-author Yi-feng Yang presents a model for a long-standing challenge for quantum physicists: explaining how superconductivity emerges in unconventional materials. 

In Nautilus magazine, SFI Omidyar Fellow Sam Scarpino explores why Nigeria has fared better in the Ebola outbreak than its similarly-impoverished neighbors.

SFI and Arizona State University have launched a major new research and education collaboration that focuses on problems at the intersections of complex biological and social systems.

SFI External Professor Michael Hochberg and co-authors argue for more and less-constrained support of basic ecological research.

Transmission of the Ebola virus occurs in social clusters and fewer cases go unreported than previously thought, according to an international research team that includes two SFI researchers.

Author and SFI Journalism Fellow Laurence Gonzales talks survival and explains why failure is inherent to the functioning of today's complex machines.

Omidyar Fellow Sam Scarpino explains how mathematical epidemiologists can help slow the spread of the Ebola virus by mapping its patterns of transmission.

In an SFI Community Lecture November 12 in Santa Fe, psychologist Ginger Rhodes and author Richard Rhodes explored the history of the socialization of violence and make an argument for early intervention. Watch their talk.

In PLOS Biology, a paper co-authored by Omidyar Fellows Caitlin Stern and Jeremy Van Cleve explores the role of mathematical modeling in evolutionary biology.

In a new paper in PNAS, two SFI researchers demonstrate a better way to reliably cluster networks into communities using methods borrowed from statistical physics.