SFI Fractal Faculty member Stuart Firestein's new book, It Could Be Otherwise, "proposes a subtly radical notion," writes SFI ...

In natural and artificial systems, the act of searching is ubiquitous, but it's also complicated: Searchers may die off or ...

Influenza spreads in a crowded barracks or prison. Ebola proliferates when per-capita hospital beds plummet below the typical ...

Artificial intelligence has permeated most aspects of society, and the legal system is no exception. Today, every step of criminal justice, from the police investigation to the trial, can — and often ...

Present-day LLMs, like ChatGPT and Claude, can perform complex tasks, from writing poetry to solving difficult algebra problems, with astounding speed and precision. Some researchers have referred to ...

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 ...

When a flock of pine grosbeaks unexpectedly spent the winter in a Bend, Oregon, neighborhood, Santa Fe Institute External Professor Stefani Crabtree (Utah State University) saw a rare opportunity. The ...

Imagine you poll your friends on how many minutes per pound to roast a turkey. Five respond with 15 minutes; one answers 33 minutes. The most popular model of conformity, the French-Harary-DeGroot ...

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. The ...

In the last decade, a phenomenon in artificial intelligence known as “double descent” has surprised researchers who study learning. The expectation was that the best AI models were neither too simple ...

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 ...