Final week to apply for the 2027 Santa Fe Institute Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. Only 7 days left! If you're an early-career scholar passionate about collaborative, transdisciplinary research beyond traditional departments, this fellowship is for you — submit your application now. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Requirements & application: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Blue Continuum, a new magazine from Nautilus founder John Steele, launched this week. Among its first stories is an essay from SFI President David Krakauer, “The Fossil Logic of the Industrial and AI Revolutions.” In the essay, Krakauer looks at the parallels between our use of fossil fuels and the way AI draws from accumulated human knowledge. Read the essay: blue-continuum.com/fossil-lo…

Applications for the 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships are open through September 30. Marina Dubova just completed SFI's Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, and she reflects on what the experience meant to her. A cognitive scientist, Dubova shares what she found at SFI, and how the freedom to follow several big questions at once shaped her time here. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Requirements & application: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Through her writing, historian, author, and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf opens windows onto the science and philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries. In her new book, “The Traveler,” Wulf gives us George Forster, an explorer and naturalist who joined James Cook's expeditions to the Antarctic and the Pacific at age 17.  He sought to learn the language, beliefs, and practices of each society they met, including the Māori, Tahitians, and Tongans, and "observed with both his mind and his heart," writes Wulf, seeing dignity and universality among everyone he met.  His views would be rare in any age, and were an especially brave departure from the imperial aims of Europe at the time. And despite a sad end, Wulf makes the arc of Forster's life glorious, writes SFI Professor Cris Moore in this review. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Direct your own research. Forge lifelong transdisciplinary connections. Apply for the 2027 Santa Fe Institute Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. Complexity Fellows contribute to SFI’s research and collaborate with leading researchers worldwide. If you recently completed your Ph.D. in any scientific discipline and are interested in transdisciplinary research, consider applying. SFI offers independent research opportunities and support to explore big questions across disciplines. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Requirements & application: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

As American midterm elections quickly approach, conventional narratives no longer fully explain who votes how. "The phenomena of Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016, or the mayoral race in New York City, which was won by an underdog, demonstrate a deeply complexifying identity landscape that can lead to political upset," says SFI Resident Faculty member Brandon Ogbunu. He and SFI Research Fellow Andrew Stier mapped Stier's data on implicit racial bias in 140 American cities onto voting records and found patterns that didn't match conventional political wisdom: places with low racial bias that leaned conservative, and high racial bias that leaned progressive. Those findings inspired a recent working group at SFI, a first step toward a theory of "Complex Political Identity." It convened experts from genetics, complex systems, psychology, anthropology, political science, and neuroscience to discuss how we think about groups and their members, how coalitional groups form, and how institutions and identities shape each other. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Catch up on SFI’s recent Community Lecture “The Indefinite Sublime: Tom McCarthy on Moby-Dick.” In this lecture, McCarthy reflected on the richness and complexity of Melville’s novel, and on why Moby-Dick still invites new ways of reading and thinking. Watch on SFI’s YouTube channel: piped.video/pwbQ6TMr4jQ

The Santa Fe Institute is hiring a postdoctoral fellow to work with SFI Professor David Wolpert on the thermodynamic cost of distributed computation, from digital circuits and neural networks to human brains. We are seeking a scholar with expertise in physics, computer science, or related fields. Ideal candidates have a background in stochastic thermodynamics, statistical physics, or theoretical computer science, and strong programming skills. The position is in person in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Application: santafe.edu/about/jobs/post-…

A random walk is a simple model of motion: each step goes in a randomly chosen direction. It's a useful approach to studying random motion, from molecules in a gas to stock-market fluctuations, and it usually assumes the walker is moving through surroundings that stay fixed. Much of the world isn't like that. Molecules, cells, and microbes get where they're going by shoving other things aside, deforming the medium as they cross it. In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, SFI Professor Sidney Redner and colleagues propose a model in which the walker can push obstacles out of its way, and work out what a rearranged medium does to the walk. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

While "optimism" isn't quite a taboo word in science, it is not a sentiment most scientists would use to describe their outlook. So much of the process of science is defined by failure, and successes are caricatured as intrepid scientists raging against a status quo machine. In his new book, It Could Be Otherwise, neurobiologist and SFI Fractal Faculty Stuart Firestein proposes a subtly radical notion: that optimism, as much as conflict, has always been a character in the development of modern science, and that it should be named and clarified. Doing so, he argues, can lead to a more creative and integrative scientific endeavor, writes SFI Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu in this review. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Animals forage, immune cells patrol the body for pathogens, and algorithms trawl for optimal solutions to thorny problems. In natural and artificial systems alike, the act of searching is ubiquitous, says SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Aanjaneya Kumar.  It's also complicated: searchers may die off or disappear, and new searchers can join the hunt. In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, Kumar and Samantha Linn, a mathematician at Imperial College London, describe how that shifting cast shapes the search, an influence that has until now remained largely unexplored. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Applications for the 2027 Santa Fe Institute Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships are open. Collaborate with researchers from around the world. Chart your own transdisciplinary path. With a competitive salary, discretionary research and travel funds, and a generous benefits package including paid family leave, the fellowship offers early-career scholars the opportunity to become leaders in transdisciplinary research. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Requirements & application: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Influenza spreads faster in a crowded barracks or prison. Ebola proliferates when hospital beds run short. For decades, researchers have documented how social inequality shapes disease spread. In parallel, mathematical models have emerged for forecasting epidemics and weighing different public health interventions. But rarely have the two subfields of epidemiology joined forces. A new paper in Biology Letters, led by SFI Resident Professor Brandon Ogbunu with SFI External Professor Sam Scarpino (Northeastern University) and collaborators, introduces a metric called "structural causal influence" that quantifies how factors like crowded housing, limited vaccine access, and financial barriers shape the way disease spreads, and whether public health interventions will actually work. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

In this seminar, SFI External Professor Holly Moeller (University of California, Santa Barbara) explores how organisms gain access to metabolism from other species through interactions ranging from mutualism to predation.  Using examples including chloroplast-stealing marine microbes and tree-fungal mutualisms, she examines how acquired metabolism can drive niche expansion and evolutionary diversification. Watch Moeller's SFI seminar: piped.video/wmLSrpC2ujg

SFI welcomes new External Faculty members for 2026. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to more than 70 institutions around the globe. This year, six new researchers joined SFI’s External Faculty: - Henry Farrell (Johns Hopkins University) - Robert Goldstone (Indiana University Bloomington) - Hahrie Han (Johns Hopkins University) - Holly Moeller (University of California, Santa Barbara) - Washington Taylor (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) - Elke Weber (Princeton University) Learn more about them: santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Applications for the 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships are open through September 30. Katrin Schmelz just completed SFI’s Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, and she reflects on what the experience meant to her. A behavioral economist and psychologist, Schmelz shares what drew her to the Santa Fe Institute and why the fellowship's intellectual freedom made it worthwhile. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Requirements & application: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Every human has implicit biases, or involuntary associations about members of different social groups. But these biases are not fixed. Rather, they’re malleable reflections of our everyday experiences. It’s harder to change the biases of people living in big cities, with millions of people, however, than it is to change the biases of people living in small cities, a new study shows. This is “the first strong proof of how contextual biases are,” says Andrew Stier, a Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute who performed the work. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Competition to publish in elite journals like Science, Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine is fierce, yet the confidentiality of the peer-review process — the gold standard for assessing whether a study meets the criteria for publication — has long made the process itself hard to study. A new paper in Science Advances offers a first look. Examining more than 110,000 submissions to Science and Science Advances from 2016 through 2020, former SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Sam Zhang, with SFI External Professors Aaron Clauset and Dan Larremore and colleagues, present the first such analysis of publication trends at top journals. They find that submissions from prestigious universities with large research teams were more likely to be published, while smaller teams, authors based in China or at lesser-known schools, or whose topics focus on social sciences face a disadvantage. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

In aviation, countries manage their airspace and direct air traffic, but they also adhere to shared protocols that allow thousands of planes to traverse international airways without colliding. Something analogous is needed in space.  In a comment article recently published in Nature, SFI External Professor France Córdova, lead author Gioia Rau, and co-authors propose that governments, scientific institutions, and commercial enterprises are in urgent need of a shared framework to coordinate operations in space, as debris clutters low Earth orbit and the risk of collisions grows. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

From HIV and hepatitis C to Zika, Ebola, and mpox viruses, the list of pathogens that can be transmitted in more than one way is growing rapidly.  In a Focus article recently published in Science Advances, SFI External Professor Samuel Scarpino (Northeastern University) explains why new modelling techniques are needed to capture the dynamics of multiroute pathogens, since they behave far differently than single-route pathogens. santafe.edu/news-center/news…