Emergent Behaviour

Research into the ectomycorrhizal fungus Laccaria bicolor found that cadmium exposure can trigger stress signals in parts of the fungal network that never directly encounter the metal.

Honeybee groups carry distinct chemical signatures used to distinguish nestmates from outsiders, but those signatures change when groups are brought together.

Researchers analysing 1,245 natural vocal interactions found that wild common marmosets use flexible turn-taking, matched call-response sequences, brief pauses, and very little overlap across both within-group and intergroup exchanges.

Long before the dawn of modern parenting, animals laid eggs and moved on, leaving their progeny to fend for themselves. Now, a study published in Nature uncovers one of the elegant ways that evolution transformed neglect into nurture.

This paper proposes “Embodied Collective Intelligence,” where robot teams share world memory, task progress, and skill experience without becoming a centralized super-agent.

This funding call frames AI safety as a population-level problem involving collusion, cascading failures, emergent communication, and collective capabilities. This closes 9-August-2026.

Google DeepMind’s roadmap treats future AI agents as operational actors that may need containment, monitoring, and layered controls, borrowing ideas from cybersecurity and safety engineering.

DARPA’s new DICE (Decentralized Artificial Intelligence through Controlled Emergence) program may be one of the strongest real-world signals yet that biological coordination principles are moving into operational AI architectures.

29-Nov-2026 Hong Kong - DAI 2026 places coordination, markets, agent infrastructure, and societies of autonomous agents at the center of distributed AI research.

If there is a single institution that has consistently explored how intelligence emerges from interactions rather than instruction, it is the Santa Fe Institute.