The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
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.
In a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, three SFI faculty members examine the effects of changing technology on social networks.
SFI External Professor Tim Kohler and colleagues use tree-ring chronologies to understand the possible effects of ancient climate change on food production — and address a longstanding mystery of North American archaeology.
In PLOS Computational Biology, SFI Omidyar Fellow Evandro Ferrada argues that an underlying architecture shapes the enigmatic creation of proteins from amino acids.
On the heels of a manifesto on the nature of ecological theory, SFI researchers and their collaborators met in Chile in October to discuss its future.
SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt in his three-day workshop “Acting Locally, Understanding Locally: Scaling Up Community Collected Data in Developing Cities ”addressed the information crisis through improved data and data collection of cities that gave rise to socio-economic processes
In Nature, SFI Omidyar Fellow Sam Scarpino is among 24 co-authors offering a rebuttal to recent assertions that epidemiological models used to estimate the trajectory of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa missed the mark.
SFI Omidyar Fellow Sam Scarpino describes how SFI scientists, working with public health officials, are using mathematical models to explore the interacting factors contributing to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
In a new paper for Physical Review E, SFI External Professor Liz Bradley and colleagues quantify predictability, with a strategy for determining which predictive method best suits a given system.
Two-dozen researchers from varied fields have convened at SFI this week to assess the current state and future directions of burgeoning research in niche construction: the modification of environments by organisms living in them.
To understand market crashes and bubbles, SFI's Geoffrey West and three co-authors advocate a revised view that treats an economy like biologists might think about an ecosystem rife with evolutionary dynamics.
In the age of social media, fear of a virus can spread much faster than the virus itself, according to SFI External Professor Joshua Epstein.
Researchers are using remote-sensing and satellite technology to understand the movements of indigenous tribes in the Amazon. Their work could influence policies intended to protect the habitats of "uncontacted" people.
In the video from an October 15 SFI Community Lecture, SFI's Sid Redner draws on sports statistics to bust a few common myths about scoring streaks, "hot hands," and infamous team curses.
In a letter to the journal Science, SFI Omidyar Fellow Sam Scarpino and co-authors stress the importance of understanding mobility patterns to dynamically model the spread of Ebola.
An editorial in Nature Materials highlights work by SFI External Professor James Crutchfield and his colleague for their information-theoretic measure of material structure.