News + Events

In an SFI Community Lecture March 12, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar explained why our brains are hard-wired to maintain meaningful relationships with no more than around 150 people -- and this includes Internet relationships. Watch the lecture.

In Prospect magazine's World Thinkers 2014 series, philosopher and SFI External Professor Dan Dennett exchanges perspectives with philosopher Richard Swinburne on how academics should approach the study of religion.

An analysis led by SFI's Marcus Hamilton paints a grim picture of the experiences of indigenous societies following contact with Western Europeans, but also offers hope to those seeking to preserve Brazil’s remaining indigenous societies.

In an SFI seminar video, SFI journalism fellow Julie Rehmeyer explores society's poor handling of illnesses without clear causal mechanisms or sharply-defined symptoms, including her firsthand experience with chronic fatigue syndrome.

Bullies inevitably frustrate other members of a community, but they might be key to the group's success in conflicts with other groups, according to a new study that sheds light on the evolutionary roots of cooperation.

Princeton's Simon Levin, a member of SFI's Science Board, has been awarded the 2014 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement for bridging ecological research and environmental policy, economics, and social science.

In The Huffington Post, radio/TV host Paula Gordon cites SFI's Melanie Mitchell and Murray Gell-Mann in an article on facial expressions and pattern recognition.

Low-carbon technologies are getting more affordable each year, in part thanks to government support for technology development, but continued public-policy support is needed to maintain the momentum, writes SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik.

Analysis of a highly detailed picture of feeding relationships among 700 species from a 48 million year old ecosystem provides the most compelling evidence to date that ancient food webs were organized much like modern food webs.

Physicists have made a number of lasting contributions to a deeper understanding of finance and economics, including a few researchers affiliated with SFI, writes Mark Buchanan in a review of "econophysics."

New research co-authored by SFI Cowan Professor Mahzarin Banaji shows that children as young as 3 tend to judge an individual’s character traits, such as trustworthiness and competence, simply by looking at the person’s face.

SFI External Professor Mark Pagel writes in Wired that human invention isn't creativity so much as improving on and combining ideas that came earlier -- and that is essentially the same process as evolution, he contends.

A new paper co-authored by SFI External Professor Miguel Fuentes shows that that the distribution of the variables of systems at the edge of chaos has a very different shape than previously reported.

A study led by by SFI External Professor Mercedes Pascual shows that malaria creeps to higher elevations during warmer years, suggesting that climate change will bring the mosquito-borne disease to higher, more densely-populated regions.

Digital footprints left on search engines, social media, and social networking sites can yield anonymous and instantaneous insights, according to a commentary co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Ben Althouse.

In PNAS, Doug Erwin suggests that the similarities seen in the data on past mass extinctions may lie not with the triggering mechanisms, but in how the Earth’s biota responds to environmental insults.

SFI Distinguished Fellow Murray Gell-Mann was honored at Caltech in December during an event celebrating “50 years of the quark.” Watch the presentations.

For decades, linguists seeking to sort out the history of language sifted through words and grammars by hand in search of clues to tongues’ shared pasts.

Former Omidyar Fellow Scott Ortman summarizes his research with SFI's Luis Bettencourt showing that the same equations describe all human settlements, from the ancient cities of the Aztecs to today's megacities.

Is wartime rape inevitable? No, says SFI External Proffessor Libby Wood, who notes that 64 percent of armed-conflict actors in Africa do not engage in rape.