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 ...

SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt and co-author Nicholas Marchio, both researchers at the University of Chicago, use the first complete dataset of more than 415 million buildings across 50 ...

SFI External Professors Alison Gopnik and Scott Page are among 120 new members of the National Academy of Sciences announced this week. Election to NAS recognizes the members’ “distinguished and ...

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 ...

In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing more deeply into their profession. Computer programmers need a solid foundation in basic mathematics; nurses must gain ...

The oceans teem with photosynthesizing bacteria, tiny-tailed dinoflagellates gobbling other plankton, algae surrounded by intricate glass skeletons. In the 1960s, the ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson ...

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 ...