Economic inequality is one of our primary global challenges and is a key research topic for archaeology — Why do some ...

As artificial intelligence has become a regular part of our daily lives, companies have run into a serious problem: their longstanding tools for measuring AI performance and safety no longer suffice.

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) has received a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Science. She shares the award with social psychologists Icek Ajzen, ...

Scientists usually use a hypergraph model to predict dynamic behaviors. But the opposite problem is interesting, too. What if researchers can observe the dynamics but don’t have access to a ...

In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing more deeply into their profession. A recent paper in Nature Human Behavior mapped the dependency relationships ...

A new paper in PNAS shows that the idea of “taking turns” could help resolve the 1960s paradox of the plankton — and better predict how climate change will remake our ...

Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the parsimony principle, “Ockham’s razor” has shaped scientific ...

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with ...

Multi-scale complex systems are ubiquitous and also notoriously difficult to model. In disturbed systems, conventional bottom-up or top-down approaches can’t capture the interactions between the ...

Historians of philosophy are like painters; by giving an interpretation of another philosopher’s problems and concepts, they paint philosophical portraits. SFI Research Fellow Anthony Eagan paints ...

Originally published in Nautilus Magazine's "Reality" issue, September 2024. Republished with permission. I remember the day when, at the age of 7, I realized that I wanted to figure out how reality ...