News + Events

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."

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.

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.

NPR’s David Brancaccio is hosting a free, virtual book club around the CORE team's introductory econ textbook.

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.

For the tenth year running, the Santa Fe Institute has ranked among the world's top science and technology and interdisciplinary think tanks.

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.

This week at SFI, researchers take a quantitative look at an age-old question: to what extent is human history shaped by impersonal trends, big ideas, and great leaders?

A new model of how animals budget their energy sheds light on how they live and explains why they tend to evolve toward larger body sizes.

At the culmination of SFI's November symposium, Bill Miller cut the ribbon to inaugurate the newly renovated Miller Campus.

In November of 2019, 14 SFI postdocs withdrew to an isolated research location to accomplish, in just 72 hours, a monumental task — decoding the first complex communication from an alien civilization.

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.

The Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees welcomes Vijay Ullal of Seabed VC.

In his quarterly column, SFI President David Krakauer asks how economics, a social science, could experience the revolutions and refutations that characterize progress in the natural sciences.

In The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design, SFI External Professor Michael Kearns and his University of Pennsylvania colleague Aaron Roth offer a set of principled solutions based on the emerging science of socially aware algorithm design.

Melanie Mitchell presented an SFI Community Lecture on artificial intelligence at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on November 12.

On October 18, a group of ten computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars from the Santa Fe Institute and The University of New Mexico submitted a formal response to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) proposal to dramatically revise the Fair Housing Act.

Through the new Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, which launched September 1, SFI is bridging the gap between academia and industry.

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.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a solid history of how we got from pocket calculators to facial recognition and self-driving cars, a lucid tour of how these systems operate, and a measured warning against placing more trust in these systems than they deserve.