In this SFI Seminar, Gianfranco Bertone of the University of Amsterdam traces the search for dark matter, beginning with the observations and arguments that made it central to cosmology, to the experiments shaping the next decade of inquiry. He also discusses a growing new direction: using gravitational waves to probe dark matter.
Watch Bertone’s seminar on SFI's YouTube (link in bio).
All of biology is transient. Over time, a population of identical cells can change so that some subgroups exhibit different behaviors — such as different size, protein expression, or metabolism. Cell biologists have long assumed that these population-scale behaviors are determined by individual-level mechanisms, and that observations of these subgroups can reveal what happens at the single-cell level.
Mathematical biologist and SFI Postdoctoral Fellow James Holehouse challenges that assumption in a recent paper, describing real-world counterexamples in which population-level cellular patterns don’t correspond to individual behaviors.
(link in bio)
Join us tomorrow at @thelensic for SFI’s Community Lecture with Tom McCarthy.
In this exclusive event, McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s tides and meridians to unpack the ways in which Melville overhauls the language of the Enlightenment and breaks open the horizons of modernity.
Tomorrow | May 12 | 7:30 pm MT
Free tickets: /events/the-indefinite-sublime or watch the live stream on SFI’s YouTube.
In this SFI Seminar, Amos Golan (American University, SFI) discusses how to make decisions when available information is insufficient to identify a unique solution.
He presents an information-theoretic approach and compares it to other decision criteria using simulations and empirical examples.
Watch Golan’s seminar on SFI's YouTube (link in bio).
In 1989, the opening of the inner-German border marked a democratic turning point lived not only in institutions, but in everyday life. A recent SFI working group led by Katrin Schmelz and Sam Bowles examined the conditions under which liberal democracy may be sustainable in the long run, with a focus on the role of economic institutions.
Schmelz explains: "how we interact in our daily life — in our jobs, for example — shapes who we become as citizens, and how a democratic culture may thrive or be degraded.” Bowles adds: “As long as Americans feel left out of the major decisions that are altering their lives, democracy will be in danger in this country." Lessons from the working group will inform a new research agenda that Schmelz and Bowles will develop over the next decade.
(link in bio)
Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Tom McCarthy on May 12, 7:30 pm at @thelensic .
McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s tides and meridians to unpack the ways in which Melville overhauls the language of the Enlightenment and breaks open the horizons of modernity.
Drawing on twentieth-century visual art as well as classical and eighteenth-century philosophy, he will reveal a “grammar of the indefinite” at work in Melville’s prose.
When: May 12, 2026 | 7:30pm
Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM.
Free tickets: /events/the-indefinite-sublime (link in bio)
Presented free to the public thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with support from The Lensic Performing Arts Center and the Santa Fe Reporter.
Beyond Borders, the quarterly column by SFI President David Krakauer, is available on Substack!
In “The Biophysics of Paradigm Change,” Krakauer moves from evolved accelerometers to cultural knowledge, paradigm change, and adaptive technology.
Read the full column here: (link in bio)
The Spring 2026 issue of Parallax is out!
Explore the latest research, ideas, and voices from the Santa Fe Institute community in our quarterly newsletter.
Read the new issue online now:
www.santafe.edu/news-center/publications (link in bio)
A chair can still look like a chair, even when reduced to a sparse cloud of points. Humans are remarkably good at recognizing objects from this kind of minimal 3D information.
A new study by SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shuhao Fu and co-authors asks whether deep learning models represent 3D shapes in similar ways, and finds that hierarchical abstraction is key to more human-like performance.
(link in bio)
For over a century, psychology has largely assumed that humans learn by simplifying experience and retaining only key themes. In a new paper inspired by the AI phenomenon known as “double descent,” SFI’s Marina Dubova and co-author Sabina Sloman explore whether humans can instead learn through excess capacity, remembering more and generalizing better.
The journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, publishes provocative research papers together with expert commentary from across the behavioral and brain sciences. Researchers with relevant expertise are invited to register their interest by May 15.
(link in bio)
Catch up on SFI’s first Community Lecture for 2026, Crossroads Democracy Panel.
The panel featured Jenna Bednar, Samuel Bowles, Hahrie Han, Katrin Schmelz, and David Krakauer as moderator, and explored what science has to say about the history, economics, psychology, and politics of democracy, the citizens’ values that it both requires and may promote, and how a renewed expansion and deepening of democracy may be the best way to save it.
Watch on SFI’s YouTube channel:
http://youtu.be/XjiqWhlLKLE (link in bio)
Human intelligence involves many dimensions, from social interaction and learning to determining how tasks fit together and acting in the real world.
As part of SFI’s broader Nature of Intelligence project, a recent working group explored AGI, or artificial general intelligence, from the perspective of cognitive science, asking how current definitions of AGI overlap with how researchers understand natural intelligence.
(link in bio)
