News + Events

A virtual working group, “Origins of Life: The Possible and the Actual,” brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers from February 1-5.

Science is slowly shifting away from equations toward algorithms, writes W. Brian Arthur in an essay published by the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. Thinking algorithmically, he says, gives researchers a way to study ideas like unpredictability and emergence.

What types of infrastructure improvements will it take to speed the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs)? In a Nature Energy paper published January 21, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik and her co-authors at MIT report a new methodology designed to identify which locations for vehicle charging stations could be prioritized

Scientists rarely have the historical data they need to see exactly how nodes in a network became connected. But a new paper by SFI's George Cantwell offers hope for reconstructing the missing information, using a new method to evaluate the rules that generate network models.

Academic publishing rarely attracts praise for aesthetics, affordability, or alacrity, but all three have defined the SFI Press since its founding in 2017. Supported by Bill Miller and the Miller Omega Program, it aims to bring new research from submission to publication within a year, at trade-book prices and in unique, collectible style.

In his quarterly column for the Parallax newsletter, SFI President David Krakauer reflects on games as "a microcosm for exploring analytical, aesthetic, moral, and practical matters."

In a recent essay for Psyche, SFI Omidyar Fellow David Kinney did the math and argues that we are not right to blame others for their misfortunes.

In a perspective piece published in Nature Machine Intelligence in January 2021, SFI External Professor Stephanie Forrest and co-author describe how evolutionary computation compares to biological evolution — and how it diverges in three key ways.

If we understand city laws, SFI's Chris Kempes and Geoffrey West argue in their op-ed at The Bridge, they can help us navigate the pitfalls of our rapidly urbanizing world — including planning for pandemics like COVID-19.

Studying ancient food webs can help scientists reconstruct communities of species, many long extinct, and even use those insights to figure out how modern-day communities might change in the future. There’s just one problem: only some species left enough of a trace for scientists to find eons later, leaving large gaps in the fossil record — and researchers’ ability to piece together the food webs from the past.

A new paper by paleoecologist Jack Shaw, SFI's Jennifer Dunne, and other researchers shines a light on those gaps and points the way to how to account for them.

New research finds that human conflict exhibits remarkable regularity despite substantial geographic and cultural differences.

What makes an explanation good enough? As a personal matter, people have different answers to this question, and not all of them agree, says a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Simon DeDeo and Zachary Wojtowicz. The authors use Bayes’ Rule, a famous theorem in probability and statistics, to investigate what we value in scientific and moral explanations. 

When a great mathematician dies, we lose direct access to a rare and brilliant mind. In 2020, three great mathematicians died: John Conway, Ronald Graham, and Freeman Dyson. In a beautiful memorial published in The New Yorker, SFI External Professor Dan Rockmore helps us recollect the wonders of each man’s singular genius.

SFI External Professor Sara Walker (Arizona State University) is leading one of the eight teams exploring specific outstanding questions in astrobiology for NASA’s Astrobiology Program's new Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research. With SFI Professor Chris Kempes and other collaborators, the team will address the question: What detectable universal patterns distinguish living chemistries across diverse planetary environments?

A new working group, “The Birth and Death of Individuals,” which plans to develop a new interdisciplinary theory of birth, aging, and death, explored questions about death, from the individual to community scales to what it means to consider an idea or form of governance "dead" during a small planning meeting in November 2020.

The Santa Fe Institute has always been defined by its ability to bring diverse, leading thinkers into the same room to tackle important research questions. So for SFI, 2020 has been something like stepping into that red chamber in the Fortress of Solitude. Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s Vice President for Science, jokes that the pandemic, with its necessary restrictions on in-person gatherings, “took away our superpower.” In this Q&A, Dunne talks about which aspects of SFI science can and cannot be replicated in a virtual environment, and what this means going into 2021.

Co-sponsored by SFI and the Institute for Advanced Studies of Aix-Marseille University, France (IMéRA), a virtual forum brought together network and complexity scientists, musicologists, music theorists, composers, performers, and neuroscientists to trade licks about the intersections of music and complexity from as many angles as possible.

SFI’s InterPlanetary Project has found a new way to celebrate the mutual influence of sci-fi and science. In a podcast interview series that launched November 18, host Caitlin McShea, SFI’s InterPlanetary Festival Director, asks artists, authors, athletes, and scientists to imagine one alien technology that could change the trajectory of human advancement. 

Quanta magazine named SFI’s information theory of individuality in their annual review of biology breakthroughs. It was one of six selections for 2020.

Parts of the planet that are diverse biologically and culturally are even more diverse than you’d expect. A group of SFI collaborators developed a theory to show why richer environments are also more complex environments, where you tend to find more species and languages.