A new study by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology’s (SMART) Mens, Manus & Machina (M3S) interdisciplinary research group, alongside collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and National University of Singapore (NUS), has identified a strong statistical association between global air connectivity and patterns of where multinational corporations (MNCs) invest and set up subsidiaries. This is the most comprehensive global study merging 7.5 million firm records with 30 years of international flight data across more than 800 cities in 142 countries.

Vipin Kumar, a composites manufacturing researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named one of 21 rising professionals nationwide for the 2026 Emerging Leaders Program of the American Composites Manufacturers Association.

Think of the economy as a giant web where every person, company, and country is linked. When something big happens — a pandemic, the rise of artificial intelligence, or a climate-driven disaster — it doesn’t just hit one strand. The shock ripples across the entire web, creating effects in real time that are hard to predict.

That’s the central theme of The Economy as an Evolving Complex System IV (SFI Press, 2026), the newest volumes in a series launched at the Santa Fe Institute nearly four decades ago to rethink economics through the lens of complexity science. Rather than assuming markets always balance neatly, these books treat the economy as a living system that grows, changes, and reacts in ways that are hard to predict.