News + Events

SFI's inaugural Complexity Challenge asked participants in SFI's education programs to apply their studies to an abstracted, real-world problem. Read more about the challenge and the winning solutions.

A study published this week in the journal Nature charts inequality across millennia, with profound implications for contemporary society.

Nick Lane presented a lecture on energy and Matter at the Origin of Life at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on November 7. Watch his talk here.

A group of ecologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists studying pre- and non-industrial human communities in places around the world are working to compile, analyze, and model data about many types of interactions to see how they vary or stay the same across cultures, ecologies, and environments over time.

Noli Timere is a forthcoming graphic novel based on recent scientific insights into the human microbiome and beneficial epidemics.

Organisms competing for contested resources like nutrients, light, and space play an important role in biodiversity shown in a recent paper co-authored by incoming SFI Omidyar Fellow Jacopo Grilli whose model offers a better understanding than that provided by previous models of how diverse communities are maintained in nature.

SFI’s Applied Complexity Network (ACtioN) is offering The Studio which is a multi-day intensive workshop wherein a group of a firm’s decision-makers convene at SFI and meet with SFI scientists to work through aspects of complexity theory that apply to their organization’s specific challenges.

The extent to which age, gender, geographic location, and education level determine how people think about democracy is the subject of a recent study by SFI External Professor Paula Sabloff and colleagues.

A theorem published this week in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics suggests that greater engagement in the international exchange can actually reinforce productivity-impeding practices that keep countries in poverty.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B features SFI research in its latest themed issue on innovations

What do you lose by moving to the suburbs? A lot, according to an SFI working group examining human settlements over thousands of years.

On Tuesday, October 17, Manfred Laubichler led a panel discussion on the unprecedented ways in which human activity has shaped the planet. Watch the panel discussion here.

The newly-established SFI Press is pleased to announce the publication of its first volume, History, Big History, & Metahistory.

In his new book, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy, SFI External Professor Scott Page traces a causative path to the benefits that emerge when people possessing a variety of “cognitive repertoires” come together to think, solve, and create.

In the Middle Ages, did contracting leprosy necessarily increase a person's chances of dying? Yes, says a new paper. But it's complicated.

The Santa Fe Institute invites space enthusiasts of all ages and backgrounds to engage with the pressing problems of today by imagining the challenges of tomorrow in a series of city-wide events from October 13 through October 17.

In a two-part lecture series in Santa Fe on September 25-26, economist John Geanakoplos explored why it is that out of all economic variables, debt causes the most trouble. Watch part one of his talk here and part two here.

In a new paper published in PLOS ONE, researchers describe a recent, rapid, and ongoing invasion of monk parakeets in Mexico.

The body includes the brain — so what role does it play in intelligence? An SFI working group meets to explore morphological computation and a theory of embodied intelligence.

The Economy, a new SFI-inspired textbook, is published in paperback format and as a free, online interactive text. The book aims to address the gap between complex, real-world economic problems and the topics traditionally taught in first-year economics courses.