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, ...

External Faculty are central to SFI’s identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to ...

It might start as a joke, a belief, or a rumor. At first, it’s easy to dismiss. But then it gains a twist, builds momentum, and spreads like wildfire. What causes some ideas to die out while others ...

Until recently, using machine learning for a specific task meant training the system on vast amounts of relevant data. The same was true for data representing a system that changes over time, says SFI ...

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 ...

SFI External Professor and Science Steering Committee member Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland) has been elected President of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an ...

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 ...