A chair can still look like a chair even when its surface is reduced to a sparse cloud of points. Humans are remarkably good ...

More than a century of psychological research has assumed that, given constrained resources for storing information, learning ...

Human intelligence involves many dimensions: we interact socially, learn quickly from other people, and determine how tasks ...

The brain runs on about 15 to 20 watts, less than most light bulbs, but has still managed to evolve a voracious appetite for energy. In humans, it accounts for only about one-fiftieth of weight but ...

Living cells are fundamentally nonequilibrium systems, meaning they constantly expend energy through seemingly one-way, irreversible processes, such as transcribing DNA into RNA, to keep life going.

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) has been named the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG).

The race to develop a virtual scientist — an AI creation that conducts every stage of research, from idea to publication — has consumed researchers, start-up founders, and tech juggernauts alike. It ...

Think of the economy as a giant web where every person, company, and country is linked. When something big happens — a pandemic, the rise of artificial intelligence, or a climate-driven disaster — it ...

Statistics such as a country’s gross domestic product or a city’s population size represent organizational and individual decisions over time. These figures are useful for policymaking, but they hide ...

In a recent paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert, SFI Fractal Faculty member Carlo Rovelli, and physicist Jordan Scharnhorst examine a long-standing, paradoxical thought experiment in statistical ...

The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it ...