The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe (New Mexico, United States) and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems. The Institute houses a small number of resident faculty, who collaborate with many affiliated and visiting scholars. Although theoretical scientific research is the Institute's primary focus, it hosts a number of complex systems summer schools, internships, and other educational programs throughout the year. The Institute's annual funding is derived primarily from private donors, grant-making foundations, government science agencies, and companies affiliated with its Business Network. The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by scientists George Cowan, David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, Peter A. Carruthers, and Richard Slansky.
These nine measures reveal how forests are controlled by climate
Instead of blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate, the vital signs for a forest are captured in key traits such as the amount of nitrogen in a tree's leaves, the leaf area, or the density of the wood. These "functional ...
Dec 28, 2018
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How complexity science can quickly detect climate record anomalies
The history of our climate is written in ice. Reading it is a matter of deciphering the complex signals pulled from tens of thousands of years of accumulated isotopes frozen miles below the surface of Antarctica.
The complexity of the commons: Scientists recast social dilemmas
Whether it's a pasture open to public grazing or a batch of glucose colonized by microbes, a shared environmental resource is often depicted as a fixed quantity, doomed to depletion if individuals selfishly consume what they ...
Exhaustive analysis reveals cell division's inner timing mechanisms
Understanding how and when cells divide is important to figuring out everything from how cancers grow to why some mammals are able to get so big. A new study of E. coli cell data, published November 7 in Science Advances, ...
New definition returns meaning to information
A fish on the Great Barrier Reef continually acquires new information from its environment—the location of food, the murkiness of the water, and the sounds of distant ships, to name a few examples. But only some of that ...
Social animals have tipping points, too
In relatively cool temperatures, Anelosimus studiosus spiders lay their eggs and spin their webs and share their prey in cooperative colonies from Massachusetts to Argentina. Temperatures may vary, but the colonies continue ...
E. coli's adaptation to extreme temperatures helps explain resistance to certain drugs
Long before bacteria had to contend with antibiotic drugs, they had to survive extreme temperatures as Earth warmed and cooled over millennia. Could the adaptations they evolved to temperature—especially heat—help explain ...
Not to scale? Maya civilizations show strange correlation
Researchers who study urban areas have long observed a connection between size and proximity—namely, that cities become more dense as they gain in population. The more people live in a place, the closer together they live ...
Out of your league? Study shows most online daters seek more desirable mates
The notion that an attractive person is "out of your league" doesn't often dissuade dating hopefuls—at least online. In fact, the majority of online daters seek out partners who are more desirable than themselves, suggests ...
The growing gap between physical and social technologies
The word "technology," from the Greek techne, usually evokes physical technologies like artificial intelligence, swarm robots, and the like. But there's an older meaning. By Jacob Bigelow's 1829 definition, technology can ...
