News + Events

New research into a massive archaeological dataset finds that the ability to store and process information was central to sociopolitical development across civilizations.

SFI Trustee Katherine Collins and ACtioN member Putnam Investments are co-hosting a Virtual Topical Meeting May 27-28 to explore how complexity science can inform sustainable investing. The meeting will bring investors together with leading climate and complexity scientists to discuss “The Complexity of Sustainability and Investing.”

On April 15, SFI hosted a flash discussion that focused on human behavior, incentives, and beliefs. The overarching message was that the financial and social fallout of the pandemic, while difficult to predict, will largely depend on actions at individual, community, and institutional levels.

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji has been elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society (APS).

Areas of the planet home to one-third of humans will become as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara within 50 years, unless greenhouse gas emissions fall, according to research by an international research team of archaeologists, ecologists, and climate scientists. The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, resulted from a 2018 SFI working group on climate change and the human "niche." It finds that rapid heating would mean that 3.5 billion people would live outside the temperature and humidity combinations in which humans have thrived for 6,000 years.

The concept of the extended phenotype provides a way to circumscribe Landauer’s bound.

Forecasting ambiguity is inevitable in exponential growth processes that underlie epidemics.

COVID-19 lockdowns provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study wildlife in empty cities. 

Mechanism design can aid the market in meeting extraordinary needs under unusual circumstances.

Policies for responding to pandemics should be rooted in a scientific understanding of cities. 

Robert McCredie May, OM, the Lord May of Oxford, and a leading figure of theoretical ecology, died on April 28, 2020. Bob, as he was known to his many friends and colleagues, was 84 years old.

R₀ is just an average: the transmission rate varies widely, and outbreaks can be surprisingly large even when the epidemic is subcritical. 

To make good decisions under uncertainty, decision-makers must act creatively to avoid paralysis, while recognizing the possibility of failure.

Test kits cannot exponentiate at the same rate as the virus. Unless we ramp up to 500K, the curve will flatten due to artifact.

The archaeological record can teach us much about cultural resilience and how to adapt to exogenous threats.

Exercise is a complex medicine that can make seniors less susceptible to frailty, and thus to COVID-19. To help the medicine go down, we need a systematic approach to improving the one technology that we know keeps people on task.

The U.S. is likely to see a near-term 24% drop in employment, 17% percent drop in wages, and 22% drop in economic activity as a result of the COVID-19 crisis according to a new study co-authored by SFI External Professor Doyne Farmer at the University of Oxford. These impacts will be very unevenly distributed, with the bottom quarter of earners at risk of a 42% loss in employment and bearing a 30% share of total wage losses. In contrast, the study estimates the top quarter of earners only risk a 7% drop in employment and an 18% share of wage losses.

There’s no free lunch when it comes to making predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Common-sense estimates provide quantitative ways to think about the economic impact of COVID-19 in Italy.

Complexity science and computer algorithms can help us address privacy concerns that arise with the pandemic.