Catch up on SFI’s first Community Lecture for 2026, Crossroads Democracy Panel.
The panel featured Jenna Bednar, Samuel Bowles, Hahrie Han, Katrin Schmelz, and David Krakauer as moderator. It explored the history, economics, psychology, and politics of democracy.
Watch on SFI’s YouTube channel:
As part of SFI’s broader Nature of Intelligence project, a recent working group explored AGI, or artificial general intelligence, from the perspective of cognitive science, asking how current definitions of AGI overlap with how researchers understand natural intelligence.
In this SFI Seminar, @andrewshtulman.bsky.social of Occidental College challenges the idea that imagination is strongest in childhood. He argues that children’s imaginations are constrained by what they know, and that learning something new is key to expanding the imagination.
A simple baseline for AI forecasting in machine learning.
In a recent paper, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang and co-author William Gilpin show that a deceptively simple forecasting strategy — context parroting — can outperform several leading machine-learning forecasting models.
Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Crossroads Democracy Panel on April 14, 7:30 pm at the Lensic.
What can science tell us about democracy’s history, current retreat, and future? Join Jenna Bednar, Samuel Bowles, Hahrie Han, Katrin Schmelz, and David Krakauer for a panel discussion.
The latest issue of SFI's monthly e-newsletter is now available. Catch up on recent research, events, and news from the Santa Fe Institute.
Read it here:
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Subscribe to receive future issues:
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SFI's Constantino Tsallis will serve as co-chair and synthesis lead of the 2027 Nobel Symposium in Physics, “Beyond Boltzmann: Complexity, Memory, and Non-Additive Entropies.”
The symposium will bring together leading experts to consolidate decades of work in generalized statistical mechanics.
The world around us is full of examples of diversity from small, incremental evolutionary changes. But sometimes, something entirely new appears. In his new book, The Origins of the New, SFI's Doug Erwin asks how radically different entities come to be, and how the world produces true novelty.
The brain consumes about 20% of our daily total. So what makes that cost worth it?
A recent SFI working group examined how the energetic cost of intelligence is balanced against its evolutionary advantages, and began charting a mathematical foundation for understanding that tradeoff.
In this SFI Seminar, Carolyn Parkinson from the University of California, Los Angeles, explores how human thought and behavior unfold within social networks, and how the demands of navigating enduring social bonds may shape the brain.
Watch Parkinson’s SFI seminar:
Living cells are nonequilibrium systems, constantly spending energy in seemingly one-way processes like transcribing DNA into RNA, to keep life going.
In a new paper, SFI's James Holehouse develops tools to study that irreversibility across thousands of genes, revealing interesting patterns.
A recent SFI working group explored how a complex adaptive systems approach could help build a more resilient, adaptive power grid — bringing together researchers and practitioners to examine how electrification, decarbonization, data centers, and digital technologies are reshaping the system.
SFI External Professor Mark Newman (University of Michigan) has been awarded the 2026 SIAM John von Neumann Prize, for his contributions to the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of network science and their application to real-world systems.
Francis Spufford, SFI’s newest Miller Scholar, blurs fiction and nonfiction in works like Red Plenty and Cahokia Jazz. In his new novel Nonesuch (out Mar 10), the fate of the world rests on one woman’s ability to interpret and manipulate complex systems linking politics, economics, WWII, and magic.
SFI's Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (@lhd.bsky.social) is the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG). Honoring “outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a better understanding of socio-economic problems.”
Some computers are easy to spot — smartphones, laptops, the machines we build. But many natural systems — cells, brains, even turbulent fluids — carry out computations too.
A new paper by SFI’s David Wolpert and Jan Korbel explores these computations encoded in natural dynamic systems.
In this SFI Seminar, Seth Frey from the University of California, Davis, shares observational, experimental, and modeling research on how social systems can change in unpredictable ways, especially when power within a system shifts to power over the system.
Watch Frey’s seminar:
New book by SFI Press: The Economy as an Evolving Complex System IV, a two-volume collection of contributions from leading scholars examining the unprecedented complexity of the global economy.
You can download PDF chapters for free, or purchase physical copies here: sfipress.org/books/eecs-iv
How can we best learn about the world? A new paper by SFI's Marina Dubova (@mdubova.bsky.social) and coauthors applies the scientific method to itself, finding that some common strategies that scientists consider gold standards for designing experiments could perform worse than random choice.
SFI’s Santiago Elena has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
He joins 62 fellows in the 2026 class. His work explores how RNA viruses adapt to hosts and manipulate cellular resources. Since joining SFI in 2008, he has organized several working groups on virus evolution.
A new study by SFI and MIT researchers shows that as systems grow, from cells to governments, the pace of adding new functions steadily slows. Though they vary in how much they invest in novelty, once new functions exist, subsequent growth follows a universal pattern known as sublinear growth.
Screenshot of the January 2026 issue of the Santa Fe Institute's e-Parallax newsletter.
The latest issue of SFI's monthly e-newsletter is now available. Catch up on recent research, events, and news from the Santa Fe Institute.
Read it here:
mailchi.mp/santafe/sfi-...
Subscribe to receive future issues:
lnkd.in/e-jhAzCA
At SFI, Kemp hopes to leverage the richness of urban-growth data by capturing patterns of behaviors among different groups at various scales, from the individual to the population level.
@jordantkemp.bsky.social
Welcome SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Jordan Kemp!
A country’s GDP or a city’s population size represents organizational and individual decisions over time — statistics useful for policymaking, but which hide the complexity stemming from regional variations in choice.
Final week to apply for SFI’s 2026 immersive, summer programs in complexity science:
Apply by Feb 4, 2026
CSSS and GWCSS : www.santafe.edu/engage/learn...
Journalism Fellowship: santafe.edu/journalism-f...
In a new paper, SFI researchers examine the Boltzmann brain, a thought experiment that raises fundamental questions about memory, entropy, and time. The work clarifies how arguments for or against these ideas depend on assumptions about the past that are not fixed by physical laws alone.
SFI President David Krakauer joins Jim Rutt, SFI Trustee Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow, on The Jim Rutt show for a wide-ranging conversation on intelligence, evolution, scientific risk-taking, how we come to understand complex phenomena, and much more.
www.jimruttshow.com/david-krakau...
SFI’s GWCSS program is designed for Ph.D. students pursuing thesis research in computational social science. Participants work closely with peers and faculty to advance their own research and take part in collaborative complexity-based problem solving.
Apply by Feb 4, 2026
santafe.edu/gwcss
A new study co-authored by SFI External Professor Laura Fortunato @anthrolog.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy (University of Oxford) challenges a long-standing claim that polygynous marriage, where men have multiple wives, creates a surplus of men with no prospect of ever marrying.
Advance your research and expand your network at SFI's 2026 CSSS program with lectures, application-focused seminars, and team projects. Participants gain experience in transdisciplinary collaboration and explore real-world questions through complexity science.
Apply by Feb 4, 2026
santafe.edu/csss