News + Events

The rapid spread of the coronavirus around the world is a grim reminder of the importance of inter-governmental cooperation — and the consequences of trying to go it alone. A new paper published in PNAS and co-authored by SFI external professor Matthew Jackson found that infection rates from diseases like COVID-19 can be decreased if nations, states, and cities develop proactive policies that allow them to act fast to contain a crisis.

In a commentary this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, SFI colleagues Simon DeDeo and Elizabeth Hobson* discuss the science of social hierarchy — what rank is, what it does, and where it comes from.

Almost 900 confirmed participants joined “WOST II” — the second annual workshop that focuses on stochastic thermodynamics and its application to many issues involving complex systems. 

In an analysis published in the journal PLOS One, alumni of the iconic Complex Systems Summer School took a close look at collaboration among a total of 823 participants who attended summer schools from 2005 to 2019.

The human world is, increasingly, an urban one — and that means elevators. Two physicists saw this as an opportunity to explore the factors that determine elevator transport capabilities in their new paper in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics.

Employing ecological tools such as food web modeling can help archaeologists create a fuller picture of the ways people interacted with their environment in the distant past.

By simulating the physiology and decisions of early way-finders, an international team of archaeologists, geographers, ecologists, and computer scientists has mapped the probable “superhighways” that led to the first peopling of the Australian continent some 50,000-70,000 years ago.

Newly published findings from a 2018 SFI working group show that Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, but when social tensions were increasing, even modest droughts could spell the end of an era of development. 

In a paper published in Science Advances, University of Michigan and Santa Fe Institute researchers report a novel belief propagation algorithm for the solution of probabilistic models on networks containing short loops.

An SFI-authored paper on “Nonlinear Information Bottleneck” is one of four papers to win the 2021 Entropy Best Paper Awards. 

Underneath the apparent messiness of forests lurk extraordinary regularities, governed by the biological mechanisms that drive universal forces of growth, death, and competition.

Data extracted from the oldest surviving document recording Korean history shows a strong correlation between extreme weather events and war.

In a new editorial at The Conversation, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik argues that climate disaster can be averted most efficiently if governments pave the way for technological innovation.

A mathematical model, validated on a large dataset of U.S. political surveys, predicts that when two groups form, both want to exclude those in the middle.

During the 2020-2021 fall semester, school districts around the United States navigated their reopening plans with little data on how SARS-CoV-2 spreads among children or how in-person learning would impact transmission in the schools’ communities. A new study in The Journal of School Health joins a growing body of evidence that, with appropriate measures, there are ways for schools to safely reopen.

How we form and change our beliefs is a scientific question with profound social implications. In a new paper, SFI researchers outline "a unifying quantitative framework that enables theoretical and empirical comparisons of different belief dynamic models.”

New research reveals the geometry behind predictable scaling relationships that apply to cities worldwide. 

SFI researchers Dana Randall and Joshua Grochow were recently featured in Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, a prominent computation blog.

Can life be created in the lab? In the Nature journal Communications Chemistry, SFI External Professor Juan Pérez-Mercader and coauthors present a new way to design and build self-assembled chemical systems within the lab that mimic simple natural systems.

Without a doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised difficult questions about the institutions, principles, and practices that underlie our economic systems. We would do well to respond to these questions by taking a more direct look at how well our current economic models respond to the empirical realities we face, write SFI Professor Sam Bowles and External Professor Wendy Carlin in an op-ed for The Financial Express.