News + Events

For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth — a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as the equator — a new creature burst into existence: the multicellular organism. Why did multicellularity arise? Solving that mystery may help pinpoint life on other planets and explain the vast diversity and complexity seen on Earth today, from sea sponges to redwoods to human society.

SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang is the winner of the 2024 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced on June 11. Since 1988, the PEN/Malamud award has recognized writers who demonstrate “dedication to the craft of the short story and whose stories are exceptionally well-realized.”

Times of crisis often call for strong and rapid action, but in polarized societies, strong top-down policies can backfire. In a paper published on June 17, 2024, in Environmental Research Letters, SFI Applied Complexity Fellow Saverio Perri, SFI Science Board Fellow Simon Levin (Princeton University), and colleagues present a conceptual model of how these dynamics could play out in efforts to decarbonize our energy supply.

SFI welcomes Anil Ananthaswamy and Adam Becker as our 2024 Complex Systems Summer School Journalism Fellows. Journalism Fellows attend SFI's four-week Complex Systems Summer School, participating fully as students, and spend an additional self-directed week at SFI’s Cowan Campus. Each year, fellows are accomplished journalists with a demonstrated interest in reporting on complexity-related topics.

A a June 10–14 workshop meets to develop a new poll for the Database of Religious History to help researchers interested in quantifying the role of music and ritual in religious practices around the world. 

Most organizations operate under command hierarchies: workers, who know the ground reality, report to managers, who know the big picture. In a recent paper, three researchers use an agent-based model to explore how the performance of hierarchical groups varies with changing environments.

Health-science research could benefit from pairing two unique methods of study, argue SFI External Professor Ross Hammond and Sharin Barkin in a May 15 perspective in PNAS. When used together, traditional trials and computational models “offer powerful synergy,” write the authors.

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) received an honorary doctorate from Yale University during its 2024 commencement ceremony in May. She was recognized for her pioneering work to "establish the role that unconscious processes play in governing human social action."

A recent study finds that exposure to conservation programs encourages future participation, even when the early programs fail.

In a paper published in Physical Review X on May 13, a quartet of physicists and computer scientists expand the modern theory of the thermodynamics of computation. By combining approaches from statistical physics and computer science, the researchers introduce mathematical equations that reveal the minimum and maximum predicted energy cost of computational processes that depend on randomness, which is a powerful tool in modern computers. 

New from the SFI Press: Foundational Papers in Complexity Science. In four volumes spanning nearly 3,000 pages, Foundational Papers looks at the past 100 years to examine the origins and history of the field of complexity. Volumes I & II were published on May 9, 2024. Volumes III & IV will be released this summer. 

Will a certain tritium atom decay by a certain time? According to our current science, this question concerning physical phenomena should be answered by sampling from a probability distribution, a process not unlike spinning a roulette wheel or rolling dice. However, a paper in Foundations of Physics suggests that the same could be true of a question concerning mathematical phenomena, even one as prosaic as “what is 2+2?” 

The Santa Fe Institute has received the Award for Contribution to the Communication of Science from the Academia Film Olomouc (AFO) in the Czech Republic. Presented on April 29, 2024, during the AFO’s 59th International Festival of Popular Science Films, the award recognizes SFI’s “systematic approach, hard and continuous work, and long-term contributions to thinking about interdisciplinarity and making it work,” says Zdeněk Rychtera, an AFO dramaturg and programmer.  

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most influential and provocative philosophers of our times, passed away on April 19 at the age of 82 in Portland, Maine. At the time of his passing, Dennett held the position of External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

In his new book Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, External Professor Doyne Farmer explains in accessible language how complexity economics works and how it could help policymakers make better decisions in the future.

SFI External Professor Karen Willcox (UT Austin), who also serves on SFI’s Science Board, recently won the 2024 Theodore von Kármán Prize for her contributions to computational science and engineering. Willcox was acknowledged for her work in the development and application of model reduction methods across diverse fields, and digital twins.

SFI External Professor Tim Kohler (Washington State University) will be delivering the Linda S. Cordell Lecture through the School for Advanced Research (SAR) on April 28, 2024, at the New Mexico History Museum. 

Researchers who study Earth’s biosphere tend to operate from one of three scientific cultures, each with distinct ways of conducting science, and which have been operating mostly independently from one another, find the authors of a Perspective published in PNAS. Three SFI researchers identify and explain the three cultures, and suggest that reconnecting them could help accelerate biosphere science.

The journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, one of the flagship publications of the Association for Psychological Science, has published two new special issues, both edited by SFI researchers and both taking an unusual approach for disciplinary journals: featuring research from a range of disciplines to address two especially timely topics. One of the special issues dives into the power and perils of human collectives, while the other takes on the rapid advances in AI.

SFI Professor Mirta Galesic has received a €3 million grant, to be distributed over the next five years, from the European Research Council (ERC) to study collective adaptation. The prestigious award will help Galesic and a team of researchers to study why collectives — from families to societies — can get stuck when tackling important problems like resolving longstanding conflicts or curbing the spread of disease.