News + Events

New research by SFI Professor David Wolpert considers how a set of interacting subsystems affects the Second Law of Thermodynamics for the system they comprise.

Until now, systems far from thermal equilibrium couldn’t be analyzed with conventional thermodynamics and statistical physics. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, David Wolpert presents a new hybrid formalism to overcome these limitations.

It takes patience and plenty of good-will to transform a dynamic and intensive in-person summer program into a virtual experience that offers genuine and impactful connections. With the support of SFI Professor and Program Director Chris Kempes and Education Program Manager Carla Shedivy, ten students around the U.S. and 11 SFI researcher-mentors proved up to the task.

Living organisms aren’t the only things that evolve over time. Cultural practices change, too, and in recent years social scientists have taken a keen interest in understanding this cultural evolution. A new experiment used drum-beats to investigate the role that environment plays on cultural shifts, confirming that different environments do indeed give rise to different cultural patterns.

How to reach emissions reduction targets while simultaneously growing New Mexico’s economy is the subject of a new report from a Santa Fe Institute workshop, which describes opportunities for New Mexico to fuel job growth and take a leading role in the Southwest region as it moves toward decarbonization.

In a special presentation for the online ScienceWriters2020 conference in October, SFI’s Joshua Garland and Mirta Galesic will present the first large-scale analysis of tens of millions of instances of hate and counter-hate speech on Twitter.

If voters gravitate toward the center of the political spectrum, why are the parties drifting farther apart? At the latest meeting of SFI’s Virtual Science Club on Sept. 16, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, an SFI Omidyar Fellow and Peters Hurst Scholar, showed 40 attendees how dynamic mathematical models can help us make sense of this and other puzzles of politics and voting

SFI External Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya of Los Alamos National Laboratory has been named a 2020 Laboratory Fellow. He is one of seven LANL scientists and engineers to receive this recognition for their scientific leadership.

SFI Professor Sidney Redner has been awarded the 2021 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize from the American Physical Society.

Former Omidyar Fellow Paul Hooper and long-time SFI collaborators Cody Ross (Max Planck Institute) and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (UC Davis) are among co-authors on a new paper that proposes an index for measuring "reproductive skew" across animal species.

The European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) honored SFI External Professor Joshua Epstein (New York University) with its most prestigious award — The Rosaria Conte Award for Outstanding Social Simulation. A pioneer and world leader in agent-based modeling, Epstein was among the first scientists to use bottom-up simulation to replicate the statistical macrostructures seen in complex social systems. 

This year, the annual postdocs’ gathering is a retreat not from SFI’s day-to-day calm, but to a recreation of it. Sheltered by strict safety protocols, the 'Pandemic Pod' is taking place in person.

This week, Jennifer Dunne was named a Fellow of the Network Science Society.

This week, Sonia Kéfi received the Erdős–Rényi Prize for young scientists from the Network Science Society.

Ecology is traditionally a data-poor discipline, but tiny microbial worlds offer the quantity of data needed to solve universal questions about abundance and diversity. New research by Jacopo Grilli reveals the fundamental relationship between the environment and the species present in a microbial community and can be used as a starting point for investigating bigger systems.

Using data from humans and other mammals, a team of scientists including researchers from the Santa Fe Institute has developed one of the first quantitative models that explains why sleep times across species and during development decrease as brains get bigger. Crucially, the model identifies a sharp transition at around 2.4 years of age, where sleep patterns change in humans as the primary purpose of sleep shifts from reorganization to repair.

SFI External Professor Raissa D’Souza has joined the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science magazine, one of the world’s top peer-reviewed journals.

Recently, a number of SFI scientists have brought new research frames to bear on the origin of life puzzle. Their work, and that of other leading researchers in the field, is highlighted in a recent Aeon essay.

SFI's Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert present their work exploring the thermodynamics of computation within the context of Turing machines.

In an essay for Aeon magazine, SFI Professor Jessica Flack and SFI Davis Professor Melanie Mitchell describe how the COVID-19 pandemic prompts us to revisit the ways that complex systems retain stability in the biological world. By learning from biological systems, we can begin to shore up the vulnerability inherent in the complex systems that undergird human life.