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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 External Professor Joshua Epstein has accepted a position as Professor of Epidemiology in the College of Global Public Health at New York University, to begin on September 1, 2017.

The Santa Fe Institute is launching an InterPlanetary Project — the first project of its kind to combine celebration with experimentation, and conversation with analysis. The event series kicks off July 18, 2017, with a panel discussion in Santa Fe, NM.

SFI Postdocs wrap up a second 72 Hours of Science with a new paper, exploring record-setting trends, posted to the arXiv.

Agent-based modeling (ABM) has been used to study everything from economics to biology to political science to business and management. This June, programmers and non-programmers alike can learn to model by enrolling in Introduction to Agent-based Modeling, Complexity Explorer’s massive open online course (MOOC).

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.

May 8-11, the SFI postdocs hunker down for an intense experiment in interdisciplinary collaboration. Their goal: to go from a new idea to a complete paper in just three days.

A long-term study of the Tsimane forger-farmers yields new insights into aging and the human life course.

This week at SFI, researchers are looking 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.

According to a new paper published this week in PNAS, creating a quantitative and systematic understanding of how cities generate wealth and better living conditions for their residents would be a big step toward achieving the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations.

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.

Simon DeDeo's new tutorial introduces learners to renormalization — a method for blurring small details in order to capture meaningful features of complex systems.

SFI science meetings highlight underlying commonalities with inventions in technology, biology, culture and economics.