News + Events

A mathematical model, validated on a large dataset of U.S. political surveys, predicts that when two groups form, both want to exclude those in the middle.

During the 2020-2021 fall semester, school districts around the United States navigated their reopening plans with little data on how SARS-CoV-2 spreads among children or how in-person learning would impact transmission in the schools’ communities. A new study in The Journal of School Health joins a growing body of evidence that, with appropriate measures, there are ways for schools to safely reopen.

New research reveals the geometry behind predictable scaling relationships that apply to cities worldwide. 

SFI researchers Dana Randall and Joshua Grochow were recently featured in Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, a prominent computation blog.

What makes something intelligent? Where is intelligence to be found? How is intelligence studied? SFI researchers Melanie Mitchell and Melanie Moses have organized a virtual conference in March that aims to answer questions about the foundations of intelligence from areas as diverse as philosophy to evolutionary intelligence and complex information processing.

Can life be created in the lab? In the Nature journal Communications Chemistry, SFI External Professor Juan Pérez-Mercader and coauthors present a new way to design and build self-assembled chemical systems within the lab that mimic simple natural systems.

For the last 150 years, economic theory has depended on assumptions that consumers and investors think hyper-rationally. It's elegant but not realistic, argues SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur in an essay published recently in Nature Physics Reviews.

Crossing disciplines, collecting new data in unconventional ways, and establishing a common language have long been hallmarks of scientific culture at the Santa Fe Institute. Now these same practices are spurring a "golden age" in social science, to which SFI researchers have made outsized contributions over the past 12 years, according to a perspective piece published February 2 in PNAS.

A new project will analyze around 500,000 congressional speeches from U.S. Senate and House proceedings to create a larger picture of the use of boundary rhetoric over nearly the last century of American political discourse.

Despite strides in family-leave offerings, and men taking a greater role in parenting, women in academia still experience about a 20% drop in productivity after having a child, while their male counterparts generally do not, according to new research by SFI and CU Boulder. 

A study led by SFI External Professor Ricard Solé shows how a new class of Turing patterns work, using synthetic biology to create them from scratch in the lab.

A review paper published in this week's Evolutionary Anthropology seeks to reconcile competing approaches in the sciences of human behavior.

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the pace of automation. SFI External Professor Doyne Farmer and colleagues determined that low-wage workers face a double-whammy of being more likely to lose their jobs to automation and less likely to have the skills to switch to newly created jobs.

Scientists must learn how effectively to enter the policy arena, argue SFI External Professor Manfred Laubichler and colleagues in a recent perspective piece for Science & Diplomacy.

In his 2020 Darwin Lecture, “Cancer Evolution: From Cells to Species and Back,” SFI External Professor Michael Hochberg, who is Distinguished Research Director with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Montpellier, France, drew on insights from network science and his own expertise in disease modeling to provide an overview of how evolution has shaped cancer into the deadly killer it is today.

Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859. Today, in honor of his birthday, we present research and reflections on evolution, which makes sense of our complex world.

Nature Communications has selected SFI research into information and sociopolitical development for its Social Sciences Focus.

Rajiv Sethi and Brendan O’Flaherty argue that successful police reform begins when we grasp the complex systems that underly current departments, in their latest op-ed in The Bridge.

In a Journal of Statistical Mechanics paper published in July 2020, Paul Krapivsky and SFI Professor Sidney Redner report an idealized model for the optimal strategy to park in the very best spot that’s closest to your destination. The paper was selected by Physics World as one of  "The 10 quirkiest physics stories of 2020."

SFI External Professor Melanie Moses argues, in her recent op-ed for Nautilus, how algorithmic thinking might hold the key to a far more successful rollout.