Connecting Research and Experts with Journalists

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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.

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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.

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Scientists examined voter data from a dozen recent elections around the world and found statistical evidence for election fraud in two of them.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.