News + Events

Scientists are getting better at prediction, but there’s good reason to believe we will eventually bump up against some fundamental limits. A recent workshop at SFI asked where those limits might be.

Whether it’s walking across hot coals or simply going to church on Sunday, people who participate in regular religious acts send a clear signal to others that they’re ready and willing to contribute to their communities, a new study suggests.

How do we recognize a face in a crowd? Experts are at SFI this month to explore how our brains process relevant information in a sea of noise.

Most US drivers could perform their daily personal vehicle trips with an electric vehicle, according to a new model by SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik and colleagues.

Drawing from network science, decision-making tools with artificial intelligence, and social influence theories, experts gathered at SFI recently to explore new ways to spark large-scale social change.

To prepare for climate change, urbanization, or antibiotic resistance, we need to know how the microbial world we are immersed in will respond to stress. A recent SFI meeting sought progress.

A new network model shows that replacing infected front-line workers with healthy ones can actually accelerate the spread of certain infections.

Stephanie Forrest and Melanie Mitchell recount the legacy of John Holland, a complexity science pioneer who passed away in August 2015.

On the popular podcast "Waking Up with Sam Harris," SFI President David Krakauer weighs in on whether your brain is an information processor. It is, he says, because it converts disorder to order.

A unique meeting at SFI in July brought together experts from fields as diverse as physics, neuroscience, sports, and dance to ask whether there are limits to human performance.

New research by SFI Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl and collaborators reveals that populations relying on group navigation, such as migrating birds and salmon, could be vulnerable to sudden collapse.

New research suggests that larger crowds do not always produce wiser decisions. Moderately-sized crowds are likely to outperform larger ones when faced with combinations of easy and difficult qualitative decisions.

In a recent paper in the Journal of Network and Computer Applications, SFI Postdoc Justin Grana and his collaborators call on game theory to suggest a better way to stop cyber attackers.

Watch linguist John McWhorter deliver a community lecture in which he rethinks the widely-held belief that the language we speak shapes how we experience life.

During a working group this week at SFI, roughly a dozen ecologists and computer scientists will explore ways emerging technologies might help researchers better understand why and how individuals in migrating groups make the choices they do.

Researchers meet at SFI this week to understand how two evolutionary strategies — migration and cooperation — might have co-evolved, and in what situations one strategy prevails.

SFI External Professor Jim Hartle has been named a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Imprecise, noisy computations can actually cool a biological system, according to a new analysis by SFI Professor David Wolpert.

In a study published in Nature Climate Change, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik and colleagues assess the market value of storage technology such as batteries, pumped hydroelectric, and compressed air energy storage.