News + Events

On April 12, Carlos Castillo-Chavez unraveled the complex factors that fuel the spread of deadly diseases, and how we can use our knowledge of them to prevent future outbreaks. Watch the video here.

In a test of the limits of scientific collaboration, 15 postdocs holed up in a home in the New Mexico foothills recently for three days and nights of intense scientific research. Their goal: produce a novel research paper in just 72 hours.

 In Quantitative Finance, SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner and colleagues suggest that a tax on interbank loans scaled to the risk each transaction adds to the system would more effectively limit financial systemic risk than proposed "one size fits all" risk taxes.

Humans aren't the only species that farms; leafcutter ants, termites, and some beetles grow their own food. A working group met recently at SFI to explore the evolution of agriculture in insects and humans.

A collaboration of international researchers, including four SFI scientists, has been awarded $8 million to extend our understanding of evolution.

Upper and lower bounds on the sizes of bacteria and the physiological tradeoffs that constrain these size limits are explored in a new paper co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Chris Kempes.

Harold Morowitz, a leading figure in shaping the scientific and popular understanding of the chemical origins of life on Earth, passed away March 22 in Fairfax, Va.

Whooping cough is on the rise in the US, and the adoption of a new vaccine in the 1990s is part of the explanation. Two former SFI Omidyar Fellows propose a hybrid vaccination protocol they say could slash cases by 95 percent.

In a recent paper, SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne and colleagues present their Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars concept, which models changes to an island's socioecosystem dynamics.

The author Laurence Gonzales has been named a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute for 2016. He will be in residence at the Institute periodically over the next 12 months.

This week a group of researchers, diverse even by SFI standards, have converged in Santa Fe to address the complexity of the rise of pertussis and other reemerging infectious diseases.

In a new paper, SFI professor Michael Lachmann and colleagues explore the roots of human genetic variation by comparing modern DNA to an ancient sample.

SFI has selected Will Tracy as its new Vice President for Strategic Partnerships. Tracy will begin work May 11 on a part-time consulting basis and, beginning July 1, will join SFI full-time.

Do urban scaling relationships apply to the old cities of Europe, with their unique development patterns and multiple cycles of boom and bust, or are they an aberration on the urban landscape?

SFI's Luis Bettencourt contributed to a newly-released report that could inform policies to promote innovation in urban centers.

Young male bluebirds may gain an evolutionary advantage by delaying breeding and helping out their parents' nests instead, according to new research led by SFI's Caitlin Stern.

New research in Nature Scientific Reports explores the impact of hunter-gatherers on north Pacific marine food webs and the behaviors that helped preserve their network of food sources.

A model developed by a team of SFI-affiliated researchers predicts the scale and variability of hunter-gatherer migrations based on human body size, available food resources (energy), and other factors.

Authors of a free, interactive open-access economics textbook meet at SFI to discuss new ways to teach the subject as a complex, dynamical system.

Using aerial drones to track the movements and interactions of a migrating herd of caribou, SFI Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl plans to test a hypothesis that traveling en masse helps the herd navigate.