News + Events

In PNAS, Doug Erwin suggests that the similarities seen in the data on past mass extinctions may lie not with the triggering mechanisms, but in how the Earth’s biota responds to environmental insults.

SFI Distinguished Fellow Murray Gell-Mann was honored at Caltech in December during an event celebrating “50 years of the quark.” Watch the presentations.

For decades, linguists seeking to sort out the history of language sifted through words and grammars by hand in search of clues to tongues’ shared pasts.

Former Omidyar Fellow Scott Ortman summarizes his research with SFI's Luis Bettencourt showing that the same equations describe all human settlements, from the ancient cities of the Aztecs to today's megacities.

Is wartime rape inevitable? No, says SFI External Proffessor Libby Wood, who notes that 64 percent of armed-conflict actors in Africa do not engage in rape.

To better understand the emergence of life, two researchers are taking a careful look at an unusual bacterium that lives in boiling hot springs.

Former SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo describes his research to find and explain patterns of human social behavior in data from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

A study out today in the journal Science suggests that not only are the seemingly contradictory characteristics robustness and evolvability compatible, they are, in fact, two sides of life's coin.

A global increase over the past decade in acquisitions of large tracts of land is likely to bring large-scale environmental transformations, according to a new paper by Eli Lazarus.

In a new book, SFI External Professor Joshua Epstein introduces a new theoretical software entity: Agent_Zero.

io9 editor Annalee Newitz leads a tour of two mathematical relationships scientists have used to describe the relative quantitative properties of cities: Zipf's Law and Kleiber's Law.

"Name any problem that concerns humanity and the city is the crucible where you will find it bubbling away," writes SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West in a CNN.com guest article about cities.

Physicist and science historian David Kaiser's blog reviews the top science hits of 1964, including the introduction of the notion of the subatomic quark.

In a paper this week, researchers analyze results from dozens of studies of dengue fever in primates to understand how the dengue virus spreads in the wild and, potentially, how to minimize spillover into human populations.

Of the world's advanced industrialized nations, the U.S. has the highest ratio of workers devoted to guarding things, two researchers show. Regionally, they find, guard labor seems to correlate with economic disparity.

At the 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago today, SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt discussed the relationships among urban growth, creativity, and sustainability.

The same set of equations can be used to describe the development patterns of all human settlements, from the ancient cities of the Toltecs and Aztecs to modern megacities today, according to a new study in PLOS ONE.

An article about the biological basis for human violence mentions research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles on the evolutionary roots of altruism and cooperation.

Two SFI researchers and their collaborators recently explored how patterns of reciprocity vary with people's geographic and genetic closeness by analyzing who drinks with whom, and when, in Bolivian villages.

Irene Sanders, Executive Director of the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, offers a history of complexity science and explores the challenges of applying its insights to public policy.