News + Events

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel-laureate who ordered the subatomic world and leveled his genius at complex mysteries of life and mind, died peacefully at his home May 24, 2019. He was 89 years old.

The second annual InterPlanetary Festival lands June 14-16, 2019 in Santa Fe’s Railyard Park.

Agent-based modeling has been used to study everything from economics to biology to political science to business and management. This July, programmers and non-programmers alike can learn to model by enrolling in Introduction to Agent-based Modeling, an online course offered through SFI's Complexity Explorer.

Tuesday, May 21 physicist Jean Carlson discusses the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time.

In 2018, SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales won the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Montaigne Medal for his bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He won another Eric Hoffer award in 2019 in the Legacy Nonfiction category for Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival.

The working group, "Macroecological Insights into Microbiome Resilience and Function," meets at SFI May 8-9 to attempt to link the macro and micro branches of biology.

This June, Complexity Explorer offers its first course based on unsettled research into the "Origins of Life."

A new analysis of academic productivity finds researchers' current working environments better predict their future success than the prestige of their doctoral training.

The 2019 InterPlanetary Festival takes place June 14-16 in Santa Fe, NM. 

The working group “Thermodynamic and Computational Efficiency in Cellular Chemical Reaction Networks” meets at SFI April 23-24.

Modular — or cliquey — group structure isolates the flow of communication between individuals, which might seem counterproductive to survival. But for some animal groups, more information isn't necessarily better, according to new SFI research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

SFI's Sam Bowles, Mercedes Pascual, and Daniel Schrag have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Across the globe in a variety of societies, royal women found ways to advance the issues they cared about and advocate for the people important to them as detailed in a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Research.

Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that Markov processes, widely used to model complex systems, must unfold over a larger space than previously assumed.

A new edition of Emerging Syntheses in Science, edited by SFI co-founder David Pines and published through SFI Press, offers a fresh window into SFI's founding meetings, including never-before-published transcripts and essays.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute and the Santa Fe Institute have developed a new model to explain the evolutionary origins of empathy and other related phenomena, such as emotional contagion and contagious yawning. The model suggests that the origin of a broad range of empathetic responses lies in cognitive simulation.

A new review by David Wolpert collects recent advances in understanding the thermodynamics of computation that are grounded in computer science and physics.

SFI External Professor Laura Fortunato presented a Community Lecture at The Lensic on Tuesday, April 16, 2019, on the challenges and opportunities from using studies of social animals to inform our understanding of how human social behavior evolves.

What are viruses? Are they even alive? SFI external professors Ricard Solé and Santiago F. Elena tackle these and other questions through a complex systems approach in their new book.

The Economist highlights how a complex systems approach to economics adds critical nuance to traditional approaches to the field.