News + Events

A May working group brings critics of urban scaling theory to engage in respectful dialogue with SFI scientists in the Social Reactors project.

Agent-based modeling has been used to study everything from economics to biology to political science to business and management. This July, programmers and non-programmers alike can learn to model by enrolling in Introduction to Agent-based Modeling, an online course offered through SFI's Complexity Explorer.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 physicist Jean Carlson discussed the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time.

In 2018, SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales won the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Montaigne Medal for his bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He won another Eric Hoffer award in 2019 in the Legacy Nonfiction category for Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival.

The working group, "Macroecological Insights into Microbiome Resilience and Function," meets at SFI May 8-9 to attempt to link the macro and micro branches of biology.

This June, Complexity Explorer offers its first course based on unsettled research into the "Origins of Life."

In a themed issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a collection of papers explores the differences between "liquid" and "solid" brains, their varied abilities to perform computations, and their inherent limits. 

New books by SFI Authors, highlighted in the Spring 2019 Parallax, inclue The Human Network, Emerging Syntehses in Science, and Life Finds a Way.

A new analysis of academic productivity finds researchers' current working environments better predict their future success than the prestige of their doctoral training.

While time and age in standard dynamical systems are treated as simple clocks that run at a constant rate, the human experience of age is measured by consequences. In this talk on Tuesday, May 21 at 7:30 p.m., physicist Jean Carlson will illustrate the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time through examples taken from her research and focus areas of a five-year Santa Fe Institute research theme.

The 2019 InterPlanetary Festival takes place June 14-16 in Santa Fe, NM. 

An April 25 SFI ACtioN meeting explores how organizations can benefit from research into people’s modern search and decision-making processes.

The working group “Thermodynamic and Computational Efficiency in Cellular Chemical Reaction Networks” meets at SFI April 23-24.

Modular — or cliquey — group structure isolates the flow of communication between individuals, which might seem counterproductive to survival. But for some animal groups, more information isn't necessarily better, according to new SFI research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

SFI's Sam Bowles, Mercedes Pascual, and Daniel Schrag have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Across the globe in a variety of societies, royal women found ways to advance the issues they cared about and advocate for the people important to them as detailed in a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Research.

Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that Markov processes, widely used to model complex systems, must unfold over a larger space than previously assumed.

A new edition of Emerging Syntheses in Science, edited by SFI co-founder David Pines and published through SFI Press, offers a fresh window into SFI's founding meetings, including never-before-published transcripts and essays.

A working group, “Hallmarks of Biological Failure,” meets to discuss the patterns of mortality, biological failure, and system collapse.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute and the Santa Fe Institute have developed a new model to explain the evolutionary origins of empathy and other related phenomena, such as emotional contagion and contagious yawning. The model suggests that the origin of a broad range of empathetic responses lies in cognitive simulation.