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Consider what the state of science would be without the microscope, the telescope, or a more recent technical advance like automated DNA sequencing. There would still be science, rooted in human perception and reason. But it would be far less potent than modern science, which has technologically expanded the senses, and with computers, the intellect, to explore and decipher reality, from the universe itself to the most elusive subatomic particle. The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.

A trove of material from the first SFI Global Sustainability Summer School is available for free to the public online. The scientists highlighted the following conclusions on climate and energy: Scientific evidence that our release of greenhouse gases risks dangerously warming the climate is incontrovertible. The technologies needed to start solving the problem exist today and many are ready for large-scale implementation, though a full solution will require a major commitment to further research and innovation. These low-carbon technologies represent a large economic opportunity, but the ordinary course of innovation and technological diffusion is too slow to meet the challenge of addressing climate change. Large-scale government intervention is therefore needed to accelerate this process.

There is a new service helping people in Uganda, who don’t have access to computers, find answers to their questions. Question Box was started and has been successful. Workers use their cell phones to call the Question Box call center to ask a question for locals. The call center then gives them the answer. The worker is then given free minutes for their cell phone usage. SFI Omidyar Fellow Nathan Eagle has been doing research on cellphones and development in Africa. Eagle also runs a cellphone-based business in Kenya. Eagle states, “We can’t sit in our offices in America and decide what is useful to people and what is meaningful in their lives. The services only add value if they are open-ended.”

SFI External Professor Carlos Castillo-Chavez is one of a group of mathematics and science professors who have called on the United States government to support institutional programs that have been successful in attracting and retaining minority students. According to Castillo-Chavez, many of the Chinese and Indian scientists and mathematicians are returning to their home countries. In order to keep up with researching and learning, the US will need to step up mathematics scholarships to universities.

Social networking is how everyone stays in touch these days. But as scientists start to study our newfound connectivity, some worry that we are heading for a massive friender-bender.

SFI External Professor Sander van der Leeuw and colleagues have released a study stating that identifying and quantifying planetary boundaries that must not be transgressed could help prevent human activities from causing unacceptable environmental change. Van der Leeuw and colleagues found that three of the Earth-system processes have already transgressed their boundaries. These include: climate change, rate of biodiversity loss and interference with the nitrogen cycle. The evidence suggests that as long as the thresholds are not crossed, humanity has the freedom to pursue long-term social and economic development.

Researchers have adapted Google’s web-ranking system to help in food webs. This new system could predict which groups of species would crash their food web if they became extinct. SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne calls this a “novel, exciting contribution.” Dunne goes on to say, “The problem of how ecosystems are likely to respond to the loss of species is quite important, particularly in light of how many different ways human activities are resulting in the local extinctions of populations.”

Crutchfield teaches nonlinear physics at the University of California, Davis, directs its Complexity Sciences Center, and promotes science interventions in nonscientific settings. He is mostly concerned with what patterns are, how they are created, and how intelligent agents discover them. The Leonardo/ISAST serves the international arts community by promoting and documenting work at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology, and by encouraging and stimulating collaboration between artists, scientists, and technologists.

In their study, James Crutchfield, SFI External Professor and Physics Professor at the University of California at Davis, and graduate students Christopher Ellison and John Mahoney, developed the analogy of scientists as cryptologists who are trying to glean hidden information from Nature. As they explain, “Nature speaks for herself only through the data she willingly gives up.”

SFI, now celebrating its 25th year, will offer a series of three free lectures in tribute to Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann, starting Tuesday September 15 at the James A. Little Theater.

According to finance experts and economists, the market meltdown was due to the failure of Wall Street's mathematical models of risk, which were too simple-minded. One scientist incorporating human behavior into models of risk is J. Doyne Farmer, SFI Professor. His research involves models of markets, institutions and their complex interactions, applying a hybrid discipline called econophysics. “You don’t need a model of human psychology to see that there was a danger of impending disaster,” Dr. Farmer observed. “But economists have failed to make models that accurately model such phenomena and adequately address their couplings.”

Scientists have found that the people living 3000 years ago were healthier and taller than people who have lived these past 300 years. The development of agriculture, farming, and industry has led to malnourishment and more deaths from infectious diseases. SFI External Professor Hillard Kaplan is one of the collaborators in the research of this comparison of different populations living in the Americas over the last 3000 years.

A recent study of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries reveals all the world’s finances are controlled by only a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. SFI External Professor and economist Matthew Jackson states, “Certainly people have some understanding of how large some of these financial institutions in the world are, there’s some feeling of how intertwined they are, but there’s a big difference between having an impression and actually having more explicit numbers to put behind it.

According to SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), 25,600 combatants and civilians were killed as a direct result of armed conflicts last year. While that may seem like a high number of lives lost, consider the nearly 500,000 people killed annually in violent crimes and the over 1 million people killed in automobile accidents every year. This actually shows a decline in the number of war casualties. Economist and SFI Resident Professor Samuel Bowles has researched hundreds of hunter-gatherer societies and concludes that 14 percent of deaths in those societies were caused by war and other violent acts. While a recent study estimates that all the wars and genocides of the 20th century account for less than 3 percent of all deaths worldwide. Perhaps this trend will continue and we may see peace around the world.

SFI Resident Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya and colleagues have published their research on HIV. Their analysis of allelic polymorphisms on host control of HIV revealed complete linkage disequilibrium between HCP5 and HLA-B*5701/HLA-Cw*06, a modest effect of 5’HLA-C on viral set point in the absence of HLA-B*5701, and no influence of the RNF39/ZNRD1 extended haplotype on HIV disease progression.

SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Béla Nagy and SFI Professor Doyne Farmer are co-organizers of a September 14-17 Business Network theme week held at SFI called “The future is not what it used to be.” During the week, nearly 20 participants will hear SFI researchers and veteran futurists review past attempts to predict the future, assess lessons learned, and, of course, consider what the future holds. 

Murray Gell-Mann, SFI Distinguished Professor and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics was one of the originators of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary research center in New Mexico that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Gell-Mann recently addressed a group of about 150 high school students gathered at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., for Adventures of the Mind, a biennial summit for academically outstanding 15- to 18-year-olds. Gell-Mann described the origins of and philosophy behind the Santa Fe Institute’s approach to science.

Omidyar Fellow, Jessika Trancik is a featured expert in an article on alternative energies in which she states "There are several dimensions of interest in evaluating energy technologies, including cost, carbon emissions, resource size, installation size, viability in different parts of the world, and land-use impacts, to name a few. A quantitative comparison allows us to better understand the trade-offs in moving from one technology to another."

Selected from more than 300 nominees by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, the TR35 is an elite group of accomplished young innovators who exemplify the spirit of innovation. Their work - spanning medicine, computing, communications, nanotechnology, and more - is changing our world.

SFI External Professor Douglas White and colleagues present their research into finding an approach to facilitate the design of policies in the complexity of economic networks. The research into economic networks has been studied by two perspectives: sociology and physics or computer science. White and colleagues describe what is needed in order to be able to predict and propose economic policies. With computational models, large-scale network date can be processed quickly and can reflect agent interactions.