The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
When only two things interact, the outcome is usually easily to predict. But what happens when you add a third — or fourth, or fifth, or more — component to the mix? The effects of such higher-order interactions can be difficult to forecast, and are the subject of a working group that meets this week at SFI.
The new book Pertussis: Epidemiology, Immunology, and Evolution, edited by former SFI Omidyar Fellow Samuel Scarpino and Pejman Rohani, is the first major aggregation of interdisciplinary whooping-cough research in decades.
New research by External Professor John Pepper offers an intriguing theory for how cancer evolves in people with obesity, diabetes, and chronic inflammation: By providing an over-abundance of energy to cells, these diseases might super-charge their growth and cause them to become cancerous.
New SFI research explores the unintended consequences of removing aboriginal people from their lands, with big implications for a more sustainable future.
The Santa Fe Institute again has ranked among the world's top science and technology and transdisciplinary think tanks.
A major new report takes a complex systems perspective on obesity, undernutrition, and climate change. The authors, including External Professor Ross Hammond, identify connected drivers for the three pandemics and make practical recommendations for both policy and bottom-up social change.
New SFI research challenges a popular conception of how machine learning algorithms “think” about certain tasks.
The AIP journal Chaos has announced that “Anatomy of leadership in collective behavior,” co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Joshua Garland, former Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl, and their collaborators, is among the most-downloaded papers of 2018.
Jennifer Dunne, Stefani Crabtree, and colleagues present their ArcheoEcology work in two back-to-back symposia, “How Human Interactions with Biodiversity Shape Socio-Ecological Dynamics in Deep Time” on Sunday, Feb. 17 at 1:30 and 3:30 pm at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C.
One of the first studies to examine how climate is influencing "functional traits" in forest communities on a global scale finds evidence of major changes.
Historian Andrea Wulf and philosopher John Kaag have been named Miller Scholars at the Santa Fe Institute for 2019.
New books by SFI Authors, highlighted in the Winter 2018-2019 Parallax, inclue Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems, The Model Thinker, Shadows of Doubt, Computational Matter, Viruses as Complex Adaptive Systems, and Pertussis.
A new paper published in the journal Entropy shows how tools from information theory, a branch of complexity science, can help decipher ice cores by quickly homing in on portions of the data that require further investigation.
A working group at the Santa Fe Institute recently convened to further ecological and evolutionary theory and craft an application for a National Science Foundation (NSF) “Rules of Life” grant.
An opinion piece in Trends in Ecology and Evolution introduces real-world complexity to social dilemmas by accounting for the way individuals modify and adapt to the environments that surround them.
An SFI Working Group meets to explore the big picture on viruses, from infections of single cells to epidemics among populations.
An SFI workshop explores the evolutionary consequences of developmental bias — the tendency of organisms to evolve some phenotypes more readily than others.
Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President Geoffrey West has been awarded the 2018 Los Alamos Medal by Los Alamos National Laboratory “for his groundbreaking contributions to science.”
A study co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Jacopo Grilli sheds new light on a long-standing question about what triggers cell division.
This November 5-7, a working group brings early-career scientists together at SFI to imagine a collective vision for the future of ecological networks.