News + Events

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.

To better understand the emergence of life, two researchers are taking a careful look at an unusual bacterium that lives in boiling hot springs.

Former SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo describes his research to find and explain patterns of human social behavior in data from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

A study out today in the journal Science suggests that not only are the seemingly contradictory characteristics robustness and evolvability compatible, they are, in fact, two sides of life's coin.

A global increase over the past decade in acquisitions of large tracts of land is likely to bring large-scale environmental transformations, according to a new paper by Eli Lazarus.

In a new book, SFI External Professor Joshua Epstein introduces a new theoretical software entity: Agent_Zero.

io9 editor Annalee Newitz leads a tour of two mathematical relationships scientists have used to describe the relative quantitative properties of cities: Zipf's Law and Kleiber's Law.

"Name any problem that concerns humanity and the city is the crucible where you will find it bubbling away," writes SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West in a CNN.com guest article about cities.

Physicist and science historian David Kaiser's blog reviews the top science hits of 1964, including the introduction of the notion of the subatomic quark.

In a paper this week, researchers analyze results from dozens of studies of dengue fever in primates to understand how the dengue virus spreads in the wild and, potentially, how to minimize spillover into human populations.

Of the world's advanced industrialized nations, the U.S. has the highest ratio of workers devoted to guarding things, two researchers show. Regionally, they find, guard labor seems to correlate with economic disparity.

At the 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago today, SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt discussed the relationships among urban growth, creativity, and sustainability.

The same set of equations can be used to describe the development patterns of all human settlements, from the ancient cities of the Toltecs and Aztecs to modern megacities today, according to a new study in PLOS ONE.

An article about the biological basis for human violence mentions research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles on the evolutionary roots of altruism and cooperation.

Two SFI researchers and their collaborators recently explored how patterns of reciprocity vary with people's geographic and genetic closeness by analyzing who drinks with whom, and when, in Bolivian villages.

Irene Sanders, Executive Director of the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, offers a history of complexity science and explores the challenges of applying its insights to public policy.

A collaboration at SFI January 13-15 at SFI explores how shifts in behavior can prompt feedback effects through human social systems and often shape institutions.

Evolution can both help us understand the nature of healthy organisms and suggest creative new ways to beat cancer, says SFI External Professor John Pepper in an interview on the Santa Fe Radio Cafe.

Imagine you knew everything about the current universe and all the laws governing its evolution. Endowed with such knowledge, you could then predict the future, right? Not so, says SFI Professor David Wolpert.

An article weighing the pros and cons of raising the U.S. minimum wage draws on the perspective of SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur on technological innovation and the economy.