How should we act now? A virtual workshop on the COVID-19 pandemic

On April 15, SFI hosted a flash discussion that focused on human behavior, incentives, and beliefs. The overarching message was that the financial and social fallout of the pandemic, while difficult to predict, will largely depend on actions at individual, community, and institutional levels.

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Working group chases wild ideas on domestication

What would life on Earth be were it not for the domestication of plants and animals? An SFI working group, "Re-evaluating the Origins and Trajectories of Domestication," running March 9-11, explores "the nature of relationships between human groups and lots of different plants and animals."

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EVENT CANCELLED Community Lecture: Life is What?

Event Cancelled In this SFI Community Lecture on March 24, Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life, will guide us through approaches aimed at developing a new theory for understanding life.

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Decarbonizing the energy supply

Shifting from carbon-emitting energy sources to renewable ones will be an essential part of addressing climate change, but the path to a renewable power grid is uncharted. A February 26-28 working group explores how New Mexico might best approach the transition to renewable energy sources, and what lessons could be useful for other regions.

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Wealth inequality and social network structure

An NSF-funded research project is exploring the effects of network structure on wealth inequality. In February over 40 anthropologists, economists, and others will review their research so far and chart new directions.

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Video: Crime and Punishment in the Shadows of Doubt

In this SFI Community Lecture, economist Rajiv Sethi shows the depths to which stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

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Can evolution reveal how life emerged from chemistry?

A group of biologists think that a new synthesis in evolutionary theory might help answer the question of how life’s progenitor originally emerged. A working group, meeting November 13-15, brings together evolutionary theorists and experimentalists to explore which evolutionary models might best explain how chemical systems become biological systems.

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Looking for entrenchment in all the right places

Ashley Teufel and Luis Zaman's working group, “The Point of No Return,” seeks to identify the underlying properties driving entrenchment, a phenomenon in which a single event can have a widespread effect on an entire system, and find ways to infer, predict or even control it.

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Workshop: Do living things compute?

For three days this fall, biologists, physicists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists gather for an SFI workshop to investigate the links between computational theory and biological systems. 

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