Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction

[3] An essential aspect of the BZ reaction is its so called "excitability"; under the influence of stimuli, patterns develop in what would otherwise be a perfectly quiescent medium.

Some clock reactions such as Briggs–Rauscher and BZ using tris(bipyridine)ruthenium(II) chloride as catalyst can be excited into self-organising activity through the influence of light.

[5] After Belousov's publication, Shnoll gave the project in 1961 to a graduate student, Anatol Zhabotinsky, who investigated the reaction sequence in detail;[6] however, the results of these men's work were still not widely disseminated, and were not known in the West until a conference in Prague in 1968.

[citation needed] Andrew Adamatzky,[7] a computer scientist in the University of the West of England, reported on liquid logic gates using the BZ reaction.

[8] The BZ reaction has also been used by Juan Pérez-Mercader and his group at Harvard University to create an entirely chemical Turing machine, capable of recognizing a Chomsky type-1 language.

In the case of the soil amoeba, the size of the elements is typical of single-celled organisms and the times involved are on the order of days to years.

The catalyst ion is most often cerium, but it can be also manganese, or complexes of iron, ruthenium, cobalt, copper, chromium, silver, nickel and osmium.