Santa Fe Institute

Large language models unlock the ecology of species interactions

Species interactions shape population dynamics, geographic distributions, evolutionary trajectories, and responses to environmental change. Yet data on these interactions remain scarce across broad spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales because they are difficult to collect in t...

Alzheimer’s disease neuropathological characterization of the dog brain and relationship to biofluid biomarkers and cognitive function

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder affecting more than 55 million people worldwide and is characterized by cognitive decline, amyloid-beta (Aβ) plaques, and neurofibrillary tangles. Although transgenic rodent models have advanced understanding of...

The downward legacy of a phytoplankton bloom in the oligotrophic North Pacific Subtropical Gyre

Abstract Ocean particles are a heterogeneous collection, including living and dead cells, feces, mucus‐rich aggregates, and mineral shells and frustules. In the well‐lit upper ocean, phototrophic processes fuel production of particulate matter; however, only a relatively small pe...

Past rapid spread of introduced livestock coincided with vegetation clearance on Madagascar

Debates persist around the past and present effects of introduced livestock on the native biodiversity of Madagascar. Indeed, the variable habitat and past rate of spread of livestock across the island's distinct ecoregions are poorly known. Sets of 14C and stable isotope data fr...

Towards a unified framework for multiple stable states in ecological systems

Multiple stable states-the coexistence of two or more distinct ecological configurations under identical environmental conditions-have attracted sustained interest in ecology, yet the field still lacks a unified framework connecting ecological mechanisms to dynamical models. Here...

Method, Mind, and Morality: How People Make Sense of Artificial Intelligence

How can humans make sense of the rapid takeoff of artificial intelligence (AI)? We studied the sensemaking dynamics of AI through an open-ended, mixed-methods study with computational text analysis of millions of AI-related newspaper articles and social media posts grounded in 57...

Host Breadth, Organic-Resource Associations, and Quantitative Variation in Pupal Parasitism by Brachymeria podagrica (Fabricius, 1787) (Hymenoptera: Chalcididae) in Brazil

Brachymeria podagrica (Fabricius, 1787) (Hymenoptera: Chalcididae) is a parasitoid associated with several Diptera developing in decomposing organic resources. This study integrated records from eight experimental investigations conducted in Brazil to evaluate host breadth, organ...

Open-access model for detecting openly dumped dispersed municipal solid waste from crowdsourced UAV imagery in Sub-Saharan Africa

Managing municipal solid waste in rapidly urbanizing Sub-Saharan Africa remains challenging due to dispersed informal dumping and limited high-resolution datasets for spatial monitoring. We present an open-access deep learning model for automated detection of openly dumped disper...

A firefly-inspired model for detecting the alien

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has historically been a search for aliens like us, shaped by human-centric ideas of intelligence, communication, and technology. However, humans are not the only instance of an intelligent, communicating species on Earth, and th...

Temporal Succession of Scarabaeidae and Seasonal Dynamics of Coleoptera and Acari Associated with Bovine Dung in Goiás, Brazil: Community Structure and Ecological Functions

Bovine dung is an ephemeral resource that supports taxonomically and functionally diverse arthropod assemblages whose structure changes during substrate aging and across the annual climatic cycle. This study quantitatively integrated independent experimental datasets on Coleopter...

Epithelial convergent extension as a tuning process

Self-tuning—the ability of disordered systems to develop desired collective behaviors by tuning internal couplings in response to feedback—has recently emerged as a powerful framework for understanding adaptation in amorphous solids, mechanical metamaterials, and electrical netwo...

Deep molecular profiling of lung neuroendocrine tumours and supra-carcinoids

BACKGROUND: Lung neuroendocrine tumours (NETs, also known as carcinoids) are rapidly rising in incidence worldwide but have unknown aetiology and limited therapeutic options beyond surgery. The current WHO classification, based on mitotic count and presence or absence of necrosis...

Environmental Structuring and Applied Importance of Diptera Assemblages in Brazil: Altitude, Organic Substrates, Synanthropy, Decomposition, and Chi-Square Reanalysis

Diptera associated with feces, decomposing animal tissues, fruits, and carcasses occupy dynamic habitats whose suitability varies with environmental conditions and resource characteristics. This study integrated quantitative information from eight experimental compilations conduc...

Structural causal influence captures the forces of social inequality in models of infectious disease

Abstract Mathematical models are central to understanding disease transmission for host–pathogen systems across the biosphere. However, most existing frameworks do not explicitly treat host population heterogeneity as a formal driver of variation in transmission dynamics. This ga...

Diabetes-Related Foot Ulceration as a Biological and Clinical Continuum: An Integrative Review of Risk, Chronicity, Multimodal Care, Nursing, and Recurrence Prevention

Diabetes-related foot ulceration is a progressive and recurrent complication in which neurological, vascular, biomechanical, metabolic, inflammatory, microbial, behavioral, and health-system factors interact across time. This integrative narrative review critically synthesizes ev...