News + Events

Integrating the needs of people and governments is one key to the challenges of rapid urbanization, said SFI's Luis Bettencourt in a panel discussion on “Future Megacities and the Fate of Millions” at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival last weekend, Brian Enquist describes a project to develop a geographic inventory of forest assets for western North America and model how climate change will effect species distribution.

A quarter-century ago, the revelation that complex systems don’t always follow the rules paved the way for a new approach – from biology to high- energy particle physics – that takes into account the often strong correlations between systems’ component parts. 

On Monday, June 9, some 60 early career scholars from around the world gathered on the campus of St. John’s College in Santa Fe to embark on a four-week journey through complexity.

People who live in big cities and those who live in small towns might appear to lead very different social lives. Researchers at SFI and MIT find, however, that the social networks of city dwellers are not so different from those of village dwellers.

A paper in PNAS sketches an eight-century baby boom in the American Southwest starting around 500 A.D., followed by a crash, that Tim Kohler says offers a warning sign to the modern world about overpopulation.

What is a city? In an SFI Community Lecture June 18 in Santa Fe, SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt peered inside the city, down to the data describing its neighborhoods and its people, for answers. Watch his talk.

Urban renewal can bring welcome change to failing neighborhoods, but planners must continue to evaluate those well-intentioned efforts and ask "what's next" to blunt some of the unintended consequences.

Ensia magazine asks five experts, including SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt, what they think the world's cities will be like in the year 2050. Read their answers.

SFI External Professor Steve Lansing used computer simulations to show that Bali's traditional agricultural systems had, before modern yield enhancements were imposed, been optimized over thousands of years.

SFI External Professor Brian Arthur reviews the history of what has come to be known as "Complexity Economics" and its contribution to the contemporary practice of economics.

SFI External Professor Mark Newman has been awarded the prestigious 2014 Lagrange Prize for research achievements in the sciences of complexity.

Were dinosaurs lumbering cold-blooded animals or swift warm-blooded creatures? Neither, according to a recent paper in Science co-authored by SFI External Professor Brian Enquist.

Greenhouse gases are not all the same, and past methods of accounting misvalue their relative contributions over time to climate change, according to a new study that proposes improved metrics for methane and carbon dioxide emissions.

Analysis of 150 years of transcripts from London's Old Bailey criminal court reveals that new attitudes emerged about violent crimes around 1800, suggesting a cultural shift.

SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner is among co-authors of a paper that explores use of the concept of genotype networks in studies of human population genetics.

In a Huffington Post interview, SFI Science Board member Nigel Goldenfeld discusses “the hegemony of the culture of Darwin” and today's theoretical frontiers in evolutionary biology.

In an ambitious three-day working group at SFI this week, experts will try to understand how individuals, organizations, and nations create and transmit knowledge across the boundaries that separate them.

SFI 2014 Research Experiences for Undergraduates student Emma Wolinsky describes how taking advantage of SFI education programs beginning in middle school has helped guide her along a career path in complexity science.

In a video presentation, SFI External Professor Mark Newman asks what the large-scale mathematical structures of networks can tell us about many kinds of complex systems. Watch the video.