A cell is fundamentally a container—a vessel that encapsulates life at the most basic level. Many biologists believe ...

A recent special issue of Philosophical Transactions B takes on one of the biggest mysteries in science: how life first began ...

Sahana Subramanyam was a participant in SFI's 2018 summer Research Experience for Undergraduates — now called the Undergraduate Complexity Research program. In this essay, she reflects on how the ...

SFI Resident Professor Melanie Mitchell has received a 2025 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Global markets are complex systems, shaped by feedback loops, sudden shocks, and adaptive behavior that rarely follow textbook rules and that can’t be captured by neat equations. At its core, ...

In 2022, SFI donor Hank Schuyler launched an innovative fund that supports exploratory, boundary-breaking science among SFI’s postdoctoral fellows. Honoring Hank’s late wife, the Lou Schuyler Seed ...

In a network, pairs of individual elements, or nodes, connect to each other; those connections can represent a sprawling system with myriad individual links. A hypergraph goes deeper: It gives ...

For more than 100 years, electric companies in the U.S. have maintained the same basic business model, carefully fine-tuned to sometimes conflicting local, state, and federal regulation. But over the ...

SFI External Professor and Science Steering Committee member Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland) has been elected President of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an ...

Large language models like GPT-4, the one behind ChatGPT, train on vast stores of data to complete one task: Produce a convincing sequence of words in response to a user’s written request. The tools ...

Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the parsimony principle, “Ockham’s razor” has shaped scientific decisions for ...

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with others, or ...