News + Events

A working group at SFI this week is asking how new cell types emerge and how best to differentiate between fundamental building blocks of life.

Author Neal Stephenson has joined the Santa Fe Institute as a Miller Scholar. He will visit the Institute periodically through the end of 2016. 

Whether they are groups of ants, people, companies, or economies, social systems are intrinsically complex. Learn new ways to understand complex social systems during our next short course in Santa Fe.

A working group at SFI this week is exploring the co-evolution of mammals and grassland habitats.

SFI VP for Science Jennifer Dunne and Science Board member Robert May are among 14 researchers whose work is recognized for expanding the scientific understanding of food webs over the last century.

The Santa Fe Institute’s Learning Lab has received a nearly $3 million National Science Foundation Award to develop and study a robust professional development program for middle school teachers.

A new paper in PLOS ONE by External Professor Michael Hochberg and colleagues computes how human social groups pass through different phases in their growth, structure, and behavior.

In her two 2015 Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectures, SFI's Jennifer Dunne reveals new ways to understand the sustainability of ecosystems past, present, and future. Watch the videos here.

Omidyar Fellow Yoav Kallus co-organized a workshop at SFI in mid September to explore how self-assembling materials do what they do.

A study of aggression in monk parakeets suggests that where they stand in the pecking order is a function of the bird’s carefully calibrated perceptions of the rank of their fellow feathered friends.

The Santa Fe Institute is co-hosting Systems Analysis 2015, an international conference on systems analysis, to be held November 11-13, 2015 in Vienna, Austria. Register here.

According to new research from SFI Professor Nihat Ay and colleagues, seemingly complex motor behaviors can arise from surprisingly simple brains.

Joseph Traub, a leading figure in developing the field of computational complexity, passed away Monday morning, August 24, in Santa Fe.

In a new paper in Ecology and Evolution, SFI VP for Science Jennifer Dunne and colleagues ask whether our understanding of how food webs are organized changes with the spatial dimension at which we observe them.

This week at SFI, a group of scholars is meeting at SFI to develop a common language for combining vast and varied stores of linguistics data.

A "new economic synthesis" is under way that might help topple long-held notions in neoclassical economics, according to a feature article in New Scientist that quotes a number of SFI researchers.

An article in Newsweek magazine features the recent, and unusual, Santa Fe Institute-Lannan Foundation event in Santa Fe during which art, music, math, and science collided.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dan Rockmore and David Krakauer propose a “Terminator test” to gauge not whether an intelligence is a convincing likeness of a human’s, but whether it replaces or surpasses a human’s.

A singular conversation between artist James Drake and incoming SFI President David Krakauer unfolded August 5 in Santa Fe, in conjunction with the first public reading from SFI Trustee Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Passenger.

On August 14, National Navajo Code Talkers Day, SFI commemorates the World War II Code Talkers' remarkable achievement in using an evolved human language to create the most advanced encryption algorithms of the day.