The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
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 "big dating" study by External Professors Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman reveals that geographic distance within the U.S. is the strongest driver of instances when two users message each other.
A new experiment in the "science of sync" show how complex behaviors emerge from a simple network. The work could eventually inspire interventions for heart arrhythmias, or technologies for managing modern infrastructure.
When only two things interact, the outcome is usually easily to predict. But what happens when you add a third — or fourth, or fifth, or more — component to the mix? The effects of such higher-order interactions can be difficult to forecast, and are the subject of a working group that meets this week at SFI.
New research by External Professor John Pepper offers an intriguing theory for how cancer evolves in people with obesity, diabetes, and chronic inflammation: By providing an over-abundance of energy to cells, these diseases might super-charge their growth and cause them to become cancerous.
New SFI research explores the unintended consequences of removing aboriginal people from their lands, with big implications for a more sustainable future.
The Santa Fe Institute again has ranked among the world's top science and technology and transdisciplinary think tanks.
A major new report takes a complex systems perspective on obesity, undernutrition, and climate change. The authors, including External Professor Ross Hammond, identify connected drivers for the three pandemics and make practical recommendations for both policy and bottom-up social change.
New SFI research challenges a popular conception of how machine learning algorithms “think” about certain tasks.
One of the first studies to examine how climate is influencing "functional traits" in forest communities on a global scale finds evidence of major changes.
A new paper published in the journal Entropy shows how tools from information theory, a branch of complexity science, can help decipher ice cores by quickly homing in on portions of the data that require further investigation.
An opinion piece in Trends in Ecology and Evolution introduces real-world complexity to social dilemmas by accounting for the way individuals modify and adapt to the environments that surround them.
An SFI Working Group meets to explore the big picture on viruses, from infections of single cells to epidemics among populations.
An SFI workshop explores the evolutionary consequences of developmental bias — the tendency of organisms to evolve some phenotypes more readily than others.
A study co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Jacopo Grilli sheds new light on a long-standing question about what triggers cell division.
This November 5-7, a working group brings early-career scientists together at SFI to imagine a collective vision for the future of ecological networks.
Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems synthesizes hundreds of disparate findings in complexity and articulates a single, underlying characteristic of complex systems.
R&D Magazine has selected former SFI External Professor Bette Korber to receive their prestigious Scientist of the Year Award for 2018, recognizing her innovative approach to developing an HIV vaccine.
An SFI working group explores the parallels between ancient and modern societies’ challenges in managing risk and what lessons might be found there.
Identifying meaningful information is a key challenge to disciplines from biology to artificial intelligence. In a new paper, SFI's Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert propose a broadly applicable, fully formal definition for this kind of semantic information.