The Santa Fe Institute — a private, not-for-profit research and education organization — has an opening for a two-year full-time postdoctoral fellowship. We are seeking a highly motivated scholar with expertise in physics (or in special cases in computer science), who has a desire to apply their expertise to understand the thermodynamic cost of distributed computation, from digital circuits and neural networks to human brains.

The candidate will work with PI David Wolpert on a project investigating how the network coupling the components of the distributed computer controls the tradeoff among the thermodynamic cost of running the computer, the computer’s speed, its robustness against component error, and the precise computation it performs. A particular focus will be to see how the hierarchical and / or modular structure of the network controls the tradeoff among these aspects of distributed computers.

Apply at: santafeinstitute.teamtailor.com

We are now accepting applications for the 2027 cohort until September 30, 2026.

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 creative, transdisciplinary thought in pursuit of key insights about the complex systems that matter most for science and society. The Institute rejects compartmentalized thought common in academia. Instead, SFI scientists transcend boundaries between fields, freely synthesizing ideas spanning many disciplines – from math, physics, computer science and biology to the social sciences and the humanities – in pursuit of creative insights that advance our scientific frontiers.

Read the full article at: apply-sfi.smapply.org

Explore academic impact beyond rankings. Rankless offers a fresh perspective on how universities influence each geography and topic, emphasizing diverse forms of impact and providing a richer understanding of academic influence.

Read the full article at: www.rankless.org

Nathaniel J. Gaut, Christopher Deich, Brock Cash, Tanner Hoog, Aaron E. Engelhart, Katarzyna P. Adamala

Prof. Kate Adamala and her team at the University of Minnesota have built SpudCell, a cell-like system constructed entirely from known chemical components that can perform a complete cell cycle.

The system contains 36 purified enzymes, a 90,000 base pair genome spread across nine separate DNA molecules, and a lipid membrane. SpudCell is able to grow, replicate its genome, divide, and undergo selection and competition across multiple generations.

Unlike earlier work on minimal cells that carved down living cells, SpudCell is built entirely bottom-up from individually purified, non-living components. It is the first time such a system has demonstrated a complete cell cycle.

Read the full article at: biotic.org

The 2026 edition of the Complexity 72h Workshop has wrapped up in London, bringing together roughly 60 participants and 14 tutor teams for five days of intensive, collaborative science. Hosted by Northeastern University London and the Network Science Institute (NetSI) at their Devon House campus—a striking location overlooking London’s historic St Katharine Docks, the event carried on a tradition launched in 2018 where researchers form small teams around a specific project and work flat-out for 72 hours, with the goal of having a paper ready for an online repository by the time the clock runs out. The track record so far is perfect — all 33 projects from past editions have resulted in preprints, and 9 have gone on to become peer-reviewed publications, leading to long-term collaborations.

This year’s cohort tackled a notably wide range of questions. Projects spanned political polarization and belief networks, brain connectivity and the social self, regional greenhouse-gas trends, emergent deception in LLM-based agent models, statistical signatures of success in NBA basketball, patterns in egocentric communication networks, and the long-term impact of AI on education. The diversity of topics is part of what makes the format so productive: participants arrive from different disciplines and leave having genuinely done science together. 

True to the workshop’s mission of producing a research preprint within 72 hours, the results of the seven projects can already be viewed on arXiv

Read the full article at: www.networkscienceinstitute.org