News + Events

For rulers in pre-modern states, marrying the right wife was often a path to military victory.

A team led by SFI postdoctoral researcher Laurent Hébert-Dufresne asks under what conditions a Zika outbreak might be sustained where mosquitos play no role.

Farley Ziegler, Tim Jenison, and SFI Professor Jessica Flack presented an SFI Community Lecture on painting and optics in the 17th Century and a screening of Tim's Vermeer at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on August 1.

In a new paper published in Ibis, researchers explore why Peruvian parrots eat clay despite its apparent lack of nutritional value.

When a highly-networked research institute joins forces with a vast web of citation data, new insights are bound to emerge.

An SFI working group explores how well society is prepared to deal with the accelerating pace of technological change.

Actor-playwright-director Sam Shepard, an SFI Miller Scholar, died July 27, 2017 at the age of 73.

President David Krakauer remembers "brilliant and gracious polymath" Sam Shepard, an SFI Miller Scholar who passed away July 27, 2017.

SFI President David Krakauer talks with Forbes contributor Robert Wolcott about how changing technology shapes the human experience.

Groups of interconnected nodes, called “communities” or “modules,” represent real-world relationships like friend groups on Facebook, businesses in a supply chain. A new paper addresses the challenge of identifying whether, and ultimately where, these structures exist within a mass of data.

In a fresh look at 20th-century philosopher-economist Friedrich Hayek, three authors note how the Nobel laureate’s work exemplifies complexity economics. They also show how his political support of laissez faire economic policies needn’t necessarily follow.

In a recent paper published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, SFI External Professor John Harte, SFI Omidyar Fellow Andy Rominger, and Erica Newman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona, suggest that a theory independent of mechanistic drivers, such as sunlight, can accurately describe the distribution of species in a forest.

The Santa Fe Institute is launching an InterPlanetary Project — the first project of its kind to combine celebration with experimentation, and conversation with analysis.

Michael Mauboussin, Chair of SFI's Board of Trustees and a highly-regarded research analyst known for his expertise in corporate valuation, investment process, market inefficiencies, and behavioral economics, will join the firm BlueMountain Capital Management, LLC (“BlueMountain”) in the newly created position Director of Research.

The Wall Street Journal announces SFI Chair Emeritus Bill Miller the winner of its quarterly contest for best-performing U.S. stock fund over a 12-month period.

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.