Plastic Planet: The Unseen Invasion of Microplastics in Our Lives
Waste is an inherent outcome of life on Earth and the functioning of human economies. Over time, living systems have adapted to transform waste, with…
Santa Fe Institute News
The Science Behind City Layouts and Racial Biases
Urban density, diversity, and segregation levels are key factors influencing racial biases in cities, with less segregated and more diverse environments helping reduce unconscious biases….
Scaling Laws in Enzymes May Help Predict Strange Alien Life “As We Don’t Know It”
The only references we have for “life” are the forms we know on Earth. Astrobiologists suspect that the search for alien life, and even for…
Finally, A Statistical Fix for Archaeology’s Radiocarbon Dating Problem
Archaeologists have long had a dating problem. The radiocarbon analysis typically used to reconstruct past human demographic changes relies on a method easily skewed by…
Major Branches in the Tree of Language Reconstructed
The diversity of human languages can be likened to branches on a tree. If you’re reading this in English, you’re on a branch that traces…
New Theory of Life’s Multiple Origins
The history of life on Earth has often been likened to a four-billion-year-old torch relay. One flame, lit at the beginning of the chain, continues…
First Human Inhabitants of Australia Followed “Superhighways” Across the Continent
The best path across the desert is rarely the straightest. For the first human inhabitants of Sahul — the super-continent that underlies modern Australia and…
Why the Middle Is Neglected in Politics and Other Spectrums – Mathematical Model Reveals Surprises
Are we really living in a polarized world? A mathematical model reveals surprises — particularly about people in the middle. When people talk about the…
Accounting for the Gaps in the Fossil Record of Ancient Food Webs
If you want to understand an ecosystem, look at what the species within it eat. In studying food webs — how animals and plants in…
New Model Predicts the Peaks of the COVID-19 Pandemic Around the World
As of late May, COVID-19 has killed more than 325,000 people around the world. Even though the worst seems to be over for countries like…
Where to Park Your Car? Here’s the Efficient Way, According to Math. [Video]
Just as mathematics reveals the motions of the stars and the rhythms of nature, it can also shed light on the more mundane decisions of…