Christoph Adami: Finding life we can't imagine | Video on TED.com

Christoph Adami: Finding life we can't imagine | Video on TED.com: How do we search for alien life if it's nothing like the life that we know? At TEDxUIUC Christoph Adami shows how he uses his research into artificial life -- self-replicating computer programs -- to find a signature, a 'biomarker,' that is free of our preconceptions of what life is.

First life: The search for the first replicator - New Scientist - New Scientist

First life: The search for the first replicator: Sutherland was being deliberately messy by including the phosphate from the start, but it gave the best results. That's encouraging: the primordial Earth was a messy place and it may have been ideal for making nucleotides. Sutherland now suspects there is a "Goldilocks chemistry" - not too simple, not too complex - that would produce many key compounds from the same melting pot.

"Sutherland had a real breakthrough," Holliger says. "Everyone else was barking up the wrong tree."

Complexity Digest - Networking the Complexity Community

Complexity Digest - Networking the Complexity Community: "This article contributes to the ACM Ubiquity “What is Computation” Symposium by discussing the prospects of the study of biological computation�'that is, the proposal that living organisms themselves perform computations, and, more specifically, that the abstract ideas of information and computation may be key to understanding biology in a more unified manner."

Can complexity theory explain Egypt's crisis? - science-in-society - 03 February 2011 - New Scientist

Can complexity theory explain Egypt's crisis?: "he stresses of decades of dictatorship might have turned the entire Middle East into a 'self-organised critical system' says Bar-Yam. The build-up of stresses makes such systems vulnerable to cascades of change triggered by relatively small disruptions. He and colleagues are trying to build mathematical models of the world's interlocking economic systems that might predict where the next instabilities will arise."