The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
Patents are one of the best sources of data on technology development — an open-ended, historical and adaptive system that shows us how and why inventions have come to be. But is the U.S. patent system broken?
Most election polls take the political pulse of a state or nation by reaching out to citizens about their voting plans. SFI Professor Mirta Galesic says pollsters might also ask: how do your friends plan to vote?
A new analysis by External Professor Aaron Clauset asks us to re-think the current "long peace" in terms of historical trends of calm and conflict.
A working group brings scientists from diverse fields together to develop better quantitative models of optimal decision making.
A new paper by SFI External Professor Constantino Tsallis and Debarshee Bagchi shows which statistics are best applied to complex physical systems.
A themed issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B takes an interdisciplinary approach to address the mechanisms and impacts of human cultural evolution.
A new model for extinction brings body size and metabolic scaling into a landscape where ‘hungry’ or ‘full’ animals, great and small, interact and procreate.
This February, the Santa Fe Institute hosts an international workshop to explore a more integrative approach to thinking about evolutionary biology.
SFI External Professor Jon Machta and colleagues from the University of California, Davis, show that one of the most famous models in statistical physics, the Ising model, could be used to understand why pistachio trees bloom in synchrony.
A teacher, physicist, and all-around “high throughput” individual, SFI External Professor Alfred Hübler passed away Saturday, January 27, at the age of 60.
The Meaning of Information working group meets to reconcile two different definitions of "information."
No individual fish or bee or neuron has enough information by itself to solve a complex problem, but together they can accomplish amazing things. In research recently published in Science Advances, Eleanor Brush (University of Maryland), David Krakauer, and Jessica Flack address how this is possible through a study of the emergence of social structure in primate social groups.
The first working group in Feldstein Program on Law, History, and Regulation brings leading researchers together to contribute to the burgeoning research field in the computational study of law.
A recent analysis statistically connected words appearing in the texts of 591 national constitutions lends new support to the notion of the birth of a nation.
This December 4-5, SFI researchers are convening a workshop to discuss how to study figurative brains such as ant colonies, microbe ecosystems, and the immune system.
The first annual InterPlanetary Festival will draw space enthusiasts from around the world for a two-day celebration of human ingenuity June 7-8, 2018, in Santa Fe, NM.
Exploring the limits of scientific understanding is the query that will drive a three-day workshop at SFI, which itself aims to understand how well scientific and mathematical reasoning can comprehend complex systems.
A working group led by SFI Omidyar Fellow Andy Rominger meets November 27-30 to explore ways to tackle the problem of understanding the interplay between ecological processes and evolutionary ones.
The journal Nature Ecology and Evolution has compiled a list of "100 articles every ecologist should read." Fifteen of the articles listed are authored or co-authored by SFI faculty.
SFI Professor Cristopher Moore and External Professor John Rundle have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.