In this essay, SFI Professor Cris Moore reviews Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf's latest book, The Traveler. Like her previous work, this book opens a window onto the science and philosophy of the 18th and...

Why did Obama voters pick Trump, or New Yorkers pick Mamdani? It comes down to complex political identity, a new paradigm explored in a recent SFI working group. Conventional narratives no longer full...

When physicists study a “random walk,” they’re investigating the path followed when you’re allowed to take each step in a randomly determined direction. In a confined space, a random walker sometimes ...

SFI Fractal Faculty member Stuart Firestein's new book, It Could Be Otherwise, "proposes a subtly radical notion," writes SFI Professor Brandon Ogbunu in this review: "that optimism, as much as confli...

In natural and artificial systems, the act of searching is ubiquitous, but it's also complicated: Searchers may die off or disappear, and new searchers can join the hunt. But most rigorous investigati...

For decades, researchers have rigorously documented the way social inequality shapes the spread of disease. In parallel, mathematical models have emerged for forecasting epidemics and weighing differe...

Every human has implicit biases, or involuntary associations about members of different social groups. But these biases are not fixed. Rather, they’re malleable reflections of our everyday experiences...

The small fraction of papers that make it to publication in the top scientific journals plays a powerful role in scientific discourse, shaping both public policy and scientific careers, yet the confid...

In the comment article  “Space diplomacy: bridging the operating gaps between myriad missions,” which was recently published in Nature, SFI External Professor France Córdova, lead author Gioia Rau, an...

In a Focus article recently published in Science Advances, SFI External Professor Samuel Scarpino (Northeastern University) explains why new modelling techniques are needed to capture the dynamics of ...

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When mega-societies like Rome collapse, it shows that no group is too big to fail. New research from SFI External Professor Marcus Hamilton shows why.

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SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton was among roughly 30 early-career researchers selected to participate in the Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences Annual Workshop, held this...

SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council to study fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology.

In June, three SFI Faculty members participated in panel discussions at the National Judicial Summit on the Foundation and Future of the Judiciary, addressing issues around AI use in the criminal just...

Last fall, SFI External Professor John Krakauer was named director of the Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology (CRN) — a center he helped create — at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon. He takes ...

"Marten Scheffer’s book, Tipping out of Trouble, will open your mind to how scientific knowledge can be turned into social change to address our most dire problems," writes Tim Kohler in this book rev...

Present-day LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Claude, can perform complex tasks, such as writing poetry and solving difficult algebra problems, with astounding speed and precision. Some researchers have refer...

Most people favor one hand, and that hand tends to be the better one at writing, at throwing, at managing chopsticks. The long-standing view is that the dominant hand is “born” more capable, its skill...

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In a new paper in PNAS, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton, SFI External Faculty Fellow, and Science Board Fellow Marcus Feldman, and independent researcher Jonathan F. Johannemann offer...

SFI External Professor Nicholas de Monchaux has been named the new dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED), with a term commencing July 1, 2027.

SFI Science Board Fellow Simon Levin (Princeton University) has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Society announced on May 27, 2026.

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SFI External Professor Brian Enquist (University of Arizona) has been awarded the Ecological Society of America's prestigious Robert H. MacArthur Award, which celebrates a mid-career ecologist for “me...

SFI External Professor Han van der Maas has been named the next director of the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). Van der Maas, a professor of psychological methods at the ...

The Cognitive Science Society and the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation have awarded SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova a 2026 Glushko Dissertation Prize. The prize recognizes up to five rece...

In March, SFI External Professor Aaron Clauset (University of Colorado Boulder) received two notable honors: he was elected a 2025 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and...

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) is the 2026 recipient of the Erdős-Rényi Prize, the top honor for early-career researchers working in network science.

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All of biology is transient. Over time, a population of identical cells can change so that some subgroups exhibit different behaviors — everything from varying sizes to the expression of certain prote...

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A BEYOND BORDERS column by David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute.

A chair can still look like a chair even when its surface is reduced to a sparse cloud of points. Humans are remarkably good at recognizing objects from this kind of minimal 3D information. A new stud...

More than a century of psychological research has assumed that, given constrained resources for storing information, learning should happen through forgetting most things but hanging onto only key the...