Every human has implicit biases, or involuntary associations about members of different social groups. But these biases are ...

The small fraction of papers that make it to publication in the top scientific journals plays a powerful role in scientific ...

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) has been named the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG).

Our scientists are applying quantitative techniques from non-linear dynamics, statistical physics, and evolutionary biology to find emergent patterns in historical events. Many complex systems have ...

Convening a global cohort of curious, driven, generous, and brilliant people from across a vast range of expertise and career stages sets the possibility space for SFI’s Complex Systems Summer School, ...

A mystery novel, a history book, and a fantasy epic may have little in common in plot or style. But count the words inside them and a strange regularity appears: many new words show up early, then ...

The brain runs on about 15 to 20 watts, less than most light bulbs, but has still managed to evolve a voracious appetite for energy. In humans, it accounts for only about one-fiftieth of weight but ...

“. . . the true heir to Melville and Faulkner." —Harold Bloom, literary critic. "Today feels to me like a terrible disaster where many of us lost a good friend, the Santa Fe Institute lost one of its ...

The sudden emergence of witch trials in early modern Europe may have been fueled by one of humanity's most significant intellectual milestones: the invention of the printing press in 1450. “Cities ...

Music has been a universal language across time, peoples, and geographies. We may clap, sing, play drums, or arrange symphonies to build social bonds or express emotions, and our ability to recognize ...

In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (Knopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with ...

SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt and co-author Nicholas Marchio, both researchers at the University of Chicago, use the first complete dataset of more than 415 million buildings across 50 ...