News + Events

NPR’s David Brancaccio is hosting a free, virtual book club around the CORE team's introductory econ textbook.

New work led by SFI researchers reconciles divergent methods used to analyze the scaling behavior of cities.

In a recent essay at Aeon, a group of four SFI researchers (Doyne Farmer, Fotini Markopolou, Eric Beinhocker, and Steen Rasmussen) argue that if we study the co-evolution of social and physical technologies we can better respond to new threats to democracy.

An NSF-funded research project is exploring the effects of network structure on wealth inequality. In February over 40 anthropologists, economists, and others will review their research so far and chart new directions.

A new Scientific Reports paper puts an evolutionary twist on a classic question. Instead of asking why we get cancer, Leonardo Oña of Osnabrück University and Michael Lachmann of the Santa Fe Institute use signaling theory to explore how our bodies have evolved to keep us from getting more cancer.  

In this SFI Community Lecture, economist Rajiv Sethi shows the depths to which stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

New research by SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Artemy Kolchinsky and Bernat Corominas-Murtra presents an important distinction for information theory — copying vs. transforming. Watch the video explainer.

In an op-ed for The Conversation, SFI External Professor Orit Peleg and her colleagues describe research that takes a close look at the structures that break-off swarms adopt to protect themselves from the elements.

This week at SFI, researchers take a quantitative look at an age-old question: to what extent is human history shaped by impersonal trends, big ideas, and great leaders?

In an op-ed for Fast Company, External Professor James Evans (University of Chicago) and his colleagues demonstrate that when organizations and individuals succeed after failure they follow a distinct path.

What would happen if neural networks were explicitly trained to discard useless information, and how to tell them to do so, is the subject of recent research by SFI's Artemy Kolchinsky, Brendan Tracey, and David Wolpert.

A new model of how animals budget their energy sheds light on how they live and explains why they tend to evolve toward larger body sizes.

A special issue of Isis, compiled by SFI's Manfred Laubichler and his colleagues, takes stock of the growing field of computational history.

Whether we decide to take out that insurance policy, buy Bitcoin, or switch jobs, many economic decisions boil down to a fundamental gamble about how to maximize our wealth over time. How we understand these decisions is the subject of a new perspective piece in Nature Physics that aims to correct a foundational mistake in economic theory.

In a paper published in Economics Letters, SFI's Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin propose a novel twist on the widely used Gini coefficient—a workhorse statistical measure for gauging the gap between haves and have-nots.   

At the culmination of SFI's November symposium, Bill Miller cut the ribbon to inaugurate the newly renovated Miller Campus.

In November of 2019, 14 SFI postdocs withdrew to an isolated research location to accomplish, in just 72 hours, a monumental task — decoding the first complex communication from an alien civilization.

A working group, held November 18-20 at SFI, is beginning to unpack the causes, timescales, and consequences of sleep. In particular, participants are focusing on how sleep time changes across species, and how it changes with age and during adulthood.

An SFI working group meets November 4-5 to explore phase transitions in viruses.

A group of biologists think that a new synthesis in evolutionary theory might help answer the question of how life’s progenitor originally emerged. A working group, meeting November 13-15, brings together evolutionary theorists and experimentalists to explore which evolutionary models might best explain how chemical systems become biological systems.