News + Events

Collective movement is one of the great natural wonders on Earth and has long captured our imaginations. But there’s a lot we don’t understand about how collective movement drives — and is driven by — broader ecological and evolutionary processes.

In a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, SFI Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl, long-time collaborator Colin Torney (University of Glasgow), and co-authors, used drones to collect overhead footage of migrating caribou. This is the first paper to use drones to record the movement of individual animals within groups. It is also among the first to study social interactions within those groups as they migrate.

March 22-23, complex systems researchers will meet with business executives to discuss when and how diversity improves decision-making.

Though scientists have yet to find life beyond our own planet, the universe is rife with possibilities. Where to look, and how to recognize it when we find it, are questions physical biologist Chris Kempes explored during March 20 Santa Fe Institute Community Lecture. Watch his talk here.

Patents are one of the best sources of data on technology development — an open-ended, historical and adaptive system that shows us how and why inventions have come to be. But is the U.S. patent system broken?

Calling all former SFI postdoctoral fellows, REUs, Summer School students, and faculty! We’re hosting a reunion, and we hope you can come. Register here.

Most election polls take the political pulse of a state or nation by reaching out to citizens about their voting plans. SFI Professor Mirta Galesic says pollsters might also ask: how do your friends plan to vote?

A new analysis by External Professor Aaron Clauset asks us to re-think the current "long peace" in terms of historical trends of calm and conflict.

A working group brings scientists from diverse fields together to develop better quantitative models of optimal decision making.

SFI welcomes its newest faculty member, Chris Kempes, who recently completed two and half years as an SFI Omidyar Fellow.

A new paper by SFI External Professor Constantino Tsallis and Debarshee Bagchi shows which statistics are best applied to complex physical systems.

A themed issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B takes an interdisciplinary approach to address the mechanisms and impacts of human cultural evolution.

A new model for extinction brings body size and metabolic scaling into a landscape where ‘hungry’ or ‘full’ animals, great and small, interact and procreate.

This February, the Santa Fe Institute hosts an international workshop to explore a more integrative approach to thinking about evolutionary biology.

SFI External Professor Jon Machta and colleagues from the University of California, Davis, show that one of the most famous models in statistical physics, the Ising model, could be used to understand why pistachio trees bloom in synchrony.

Physicist Sidney Redner presents an SFI Community Lecture on the role of randomness in our daily lives. Watch his talk here.

Robert McCormick Adams, a founding member of SFI’s Science Board and the ninth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, passed away January 27 at the age of 91.

A teacher, physicist, and all-around “high throughput” individual, SFI External Professor Alfred Hübler passed away Saturday, January 27, at the age of 60.

The Meaning of Information working group meets to reconcile two different definitions of "information."

No individual fish or bee or neuron has enough information by itself to solve a complex problem, but together they can accomplish amazing things. In research recently published in Science Advances, Eleanor Brush (University of Maryland), David Krakauer, and Jessica Flack address how this is possible through a study of the emergence of social structure in primate social groups.