Despite notable differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements function in much the same way as modern cities, according to new findings by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder.
A statistical technique that sorts out when changes to words’ pronunciations most likely occurred in the evolution of a language offers a renewed opportunity to trace words and languages back to their earliest common ancestor or ancestors.
A new Santa Fe Institute study by Paul Hooper and collaborators details the intergenerational food sharing in a society of Amazon forager-farmers and shows that differences in relative need determine contributions to children from parents, grandparents, and other kin.
David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been selected as the Santa Fe Institute’s next president. He plans to join the Institute on August 1, 2015.
An analysis led by the Santa Fe Institute's Marcus Hamilton paints a grim picture of the experiences of indigenous societies following contact with Western Europeans, but also offers hope to those seeking to preserve Brazil’s remaining indigenous societies.
Analysis of a highly detailed picture of feeding relationships among 700 species from a 48 million year old ecosystem provides the most compelling evidence to date that ancient food webs were organized much like modern food webs.
In Nature this week, Santa Fe Institute External Professor Andreas Wagner and University of Zurich colleague Aditya Barve, by simulating changes in an organism’s metabolism, show that most traits may emerge as non-crucial "exaptations" rather than as selection-advantageous adaptations.
A new paper in PLOS Biology this week shows that taking the unusual step of including parasites in ecological datasets does alter the structure of resulting food webs, but that's mostly due to an increase in diversity and complexity rather than the particular characteristics of parasites. The work answers some longstanding questions about the unique role parasites play in ecological networks.
One of literature’s oldest mysteries is a step closer to being solved. A new study dates Homer's The Iliad to 762 BCE and adds a quantitative means of testing ideas about history by analyzing the evolution of language.
A new quantitative study of data assembled from the online multiplayer game Pardus examines ways men and women manage their social networks drastically different, even online.
Research by a Santa Fe Institute researcher and his collaborators at the University of Missouri seeks better data that could help preserve the threatened landscapes on which indigenous human groups depend.
Two Santa Fe Institute researchers offer a coherent picture of how metabolism, and thus all life, arose. Their paper offers new insights into the likelihood of life emerging and evolving as it did on Earth, and the chances of it arising elsewhere in the universe.
A new research project at the Santa Fe Institute, in collaboration with Slum Dwellers International and backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, seeks to initiate a scientific study of urban slums worldwide.
The Santa Fe Institute's highly successful Omidyar Fellows program for interdisciplinary postdocs will be expanded in 2013, with enhancements designed to sharpen the program’s focus on preparing promising early-career scientists to lead tomorrow’s most critical scientific research.
In some human societies, men transfer their wealth to their sister's sons, a practice that puzzles evolutionary biologists. A new study by SFI's Laura Fortunato has produced insights into "matrilineal inheritance."
Scientists examined voter data from a dozen recent elections around the world and found statistical evidence for election fraud in two of them.
In a study in PLoS Computational Biology, two Santa Fe Institute researchers trace the development of life-sustaining chemistry to the earliest forms of life on Earth.
Research by Santa Fe Institute Professor Jennifer Dunne is the first to examine in detail the feeding habits of human hunter-gatherers in the food webs on which they depended.
All living organisms collect information from their environments and use it to adapt. The Santa Fe Institute has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) investigate such biological processes as computations.
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