News and events at the Santa Fe Institute
In a recent paper published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, SFI External Professor John Harte, SFI Omidyar Fellow Andy Rominger, and Erica Newman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona, suggest that a theory independent of mechanistic drivers, such as sunlight, can accurately describe the distribution of species in a forest.
The Santa Fe Institute is launching an InterPlanetary Project — the first project of its kind to combine celebration with experimentation, and conversation with analysis.
Michael Mauboussin, Chair of SFI's Board of Trustees and a highly-regarded research analyst known for his expertise in corporate valuation, investment process, market inefficiencies, and behavioral economics, will join the firm BlueMountain Capital Management, LLC (“BlueMountain”) in the newly created position Director of Research.
The Wall Street Journal announces SFI Chair Emeritus Bill Miller the winner of its quarterly contest for best-performing U.S. stock fund over a 12-month period.
The Santa Fe Institute will be pursuing questions about general, universal principles of complex time with support from the James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF) through a five year, $2.5 million grant.
Recent advances in technology have allowed scientists to probe the molecular nature of life, analyzing thousands of genes at a time and recognizing patterns of gene interaction. In a recent paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, complexity scientist Samuel Scarpino and co-authors explore gene co-expression networks that have evolved to help plants withstand drought and cold.
Bali's famous rice terraces, when seen from above, look like colorful mosaics because some farmers plant synchronously, while others plant at different times. The resulting fractal patterns are rare for man-made systems and lead to optimal harvests without global planning.
How we make decisions— or, rather, how neurons make decisions for us, is the subject of new research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. In the study, Bryan Daniels, Jessica Flack, and David Krakauer uncover a two-phase collective decision-making pattern which may suggest a general principle of collective computation.
SFI Postdocs wrap up a second 72 Hours of Science with a new paper, exploring record-setting trends, posted to the arXiv.
This volume pulls together 25 years worth of research that builds a case for universal, mathematical scaling laws and their similarities despite striking differences.
Linguistic conventions, such as the French tu-vous distinction, often signify social inequality. In new research, Sam Bowles and colleagues investigate why some such conventions fade over time while others persist as stubbornly as inequality itself.
Actors presented select scenes from Marin Gazzaniga’s play exploring deeply held assumptions about religion and belief at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on May 9.
During a ceremony Wednesday evening, May 4, the Santa Fe Institute awarded Melanie McKinley its Prize for Outstanding Teacher, and recognized 13 Santa Fe-area high school seniors for scientific excellence.
A long-term study of the Tsimane forger-farmers yields new insights into aging and the human life course.
May 3-5, 2017 at SFI, researchers looked for the ways to measure collective behavior across different systems.
Community detection is an important tool for scientists studying networks, but a new paper published in Science Advances calls into question the common practice of using metadata for ground truth validation.
An April Working Group explores how ecological systems synchronize, like in the case of Magicicada swarms.
Cormac McCarthy, the celebrated American novelist and a senior fellow at SFI, is publishing his first-ever non-fiction science essay in Nautilus magazine.
In a new paper published in the current issue of the American Journal of Political Science, SFI Omidyar Fellow Marion Dumas looks at 40 years of U.S. environmental laws to ask what impact litigious citizens have on the political bargaining process.
Michael Kearns presented an SFI Community Lecture on machine learning and social norms at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on April 4. Watch his talk here.