Santa Fe Institute

Every human has implicit biases, or involuntary associations about members of different social groups. But these biases are not fixed. Rather, they’re malleable reflections of our everyday experiences.

It’s harder to change the biases of people living in big cities, with millions of people, however, than it is to change the biases of people living in small cities, a new study shows. This is “the first strong proof of how contextual biases are,” says Andrew Stier, a Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute who performed the work.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/implicit-biases-are-harder-to-change-in-big-cities-than-in-small-cities

Competition to publish in elite journals like Science, Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine is fierce, yet the confidentiality of the peer-review process — the gold standard for assessing whether a study meets the criteria for publication — has long made the process itself hard to study. A new paper in Science Advances offers a first look.

Examining more than 110,000 submissions to Science and Science Advances from 2016 through 2020, former SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Sam Zhang, with SFI External Professors Aaron Clauset and Dan Larremore and colleagues, present the first such analysis of publication trends at top journals.

They find that submissions from prestigious universities with large research teams were more likely to be published, while smaller teams, authors based in China or at lesser-known schools, or whose topics focus on social sciences face a disadvantage.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/new-study-examines-publication-trends-at-top-journals

In aviation, countries manage their airspace and direct air traffic, but they also adhere to shared protocols that allow thousands of planes to traverse international airways without colliding. Something analogous is needed in space.

In a comment article recently published in Nature, SFI External Professor France Córdova, lead author Gioia Rau, and co-authors propose that governments, scientific institutions, and commercial enterprises are in urgent need of a shared framework to coordinate operations in space, as debris clutters low Earth orbit and the risk of collisions grows.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/coordinating-international-operations-with-space-diplomacy

From HIV and hepatitis C to Zika, Ebola, and mpox viruses, the list of pathogens that can be transmitted in more than one way is growing rapidly.

In a Focus article recently published in Science Advances, SFI External Professor Samuel Scarpino (Northeastern University) explains why new modelling techniques are needed to capture the dynamics of multiroute pathogens, since they behave far differently than single-route pathogens.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/multiroute-pathogen-transsmission-is-different

The Santa Fe Institute is now accepting applications for the 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships!

SFI is looking for recent Ph.D. graduates with strong quantitative and computational skills interested in theoretical, collaborative research. The fellowship offers unparalleled intellectual freedom and the opportunity for early-career scholars to become leaders in transdisciplinary science.

Deadline: September 30, 2026

Requirements & application:

Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship - Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships, comprising the Omidyar Fellowships, are unique among postdoctoral appointments. The Fellowships offer early-career scholars the opportunity to undertake their own independent research within a collaborative research community that nurtures....

SFI External Professor Allison Stanger (Middlebury College) has been named a 2026–27 Berlin Prize Fellow by the American Academy in Berlin. The fellowship includes a semester in residence.

There she will develop the project "Democracy in the Age of Cryptocurrency: A Global Governance Challenge," which explores how democratic societies can govern a technology that operates beyond national borders and that no single country controls.

The project pairs a historical analysis of money, going from ancient coins to modern cryptocurrencies, with a study of whether citizens' assemblies could help write rules for digital currencies that are transparent, accountable, and resistant to industry influence.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/allison-stanger-named-a-202627-berlin-prize-fellow

Catch up on our most recent Community Lecture: "Why Your Brain Hates Losing" with Colin Camerer, on loss aversion and how different regions of the brain encode gains and losses.

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atJ0APPI4Pk

This was SFI's fourth Community Lecture for 2026. You can watch lectures from this and previous years on SFI's YouTube channel.

There’s a puzzling paradox in anthropology: The larger a population gets, the better protected it should be from random fluctuations in births, deaths, and environmental conditions that could cause it to collapse. And yet, the archaeological record is rife with examples of large civilizations that have collapsed, like the Roman and Egyptian empires.

New research from SFI External Professor Marcus Hamilton, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, points to an unexpected culprit: cooperation.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/cooperation-both-protects-and-weakens-societies

SFI External Faculty Fellow Peter Schuster, one of the world’s leading theoretical chemists whose work laid the foundation for many research directions at SFI, died on June 14, 2026. He was 85.

Schuster was prominent in European sciences, serving terms as VP and President of the Austrian Academy of Science, and leading the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Vienna. During his career, he published nearly 400 scientific papers, authored 15 books, and edited multiple journals, including Complexity, where he served as Editor-in-Chief for more than a decade.

He became involved at SFI in 1991 and joined the External Faculty in 1992. Schuster's work on hypercycles and molecular quasi-species helped shape early thinking about evolution, robustness, and the origins of life. As SFI External Professor Aviv Bergman reflects, his ideas have "taken on a life of their own, mutating, traveling through generations, and finding new expression in those who inherit them."

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/in-memoriam-peter-schuster

Join us today at the Lensic Performing Arts Center for SFI's Community Lecture with Colin Camerer, "Why Your Brain Hates Losing."

Why does losing $10 hurt roughly twice as much as gaining $10 feels good? This talk explores loss aversion, drawing on fMRI studies, patients with amygdala damage, capuchin monkeys, and more, to show how different regions of the brain encode gains and losses, and how emotion, not just cold calculation, creates our aversion to loss.

Tonight | July 21 | 7:30 pm MT

Free tickets: https://lensic.org/events/why-your-brain-hates-losing/
or watch the live stream on SFI's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/atJ0APPI4Pk