As artificial intelligence has become a regular part of our daily lives, companies have run into a serious problem: their ...

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Anna Clemencia Guerrero has received a Whitman Center Fellowship from the Marine ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

When it comes to job interviews, conventional wisdom often suggests that standing out is key to securing a position — seemingly at odds with the general human tendency to conform. A new study by SFI ...

No matter how mundane or life-changing, the decisions we make are necessarily based on whatever limited information is available to us. If you’re weighing the risks of going outside during a pandemic, ...

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 ...