The influence that intrinsic local-density fluctuations can have on solutions of mean-field reaction-diffusion models is investigated numerically by means of the spatial patterns arising from two species that react and diffuse in the presence of strong internal reaction noise. The dynamics of the Gray-Scott (GS) model [P. Gray and S. K. Scott, Chem. Eng. Sci. 38, 29 (1983); and ibid.39, 1087 (1...

A new clock reaction based on chlorate, iodine and nitrous acid is presented. The induction period of this new clock reaction decreases when the initial concentrations of chlorate, nitrous acid and perchloric acid increase, but it is independent on the initial iodine concentration. The proposed mechanism is based on the LLKE autocatalytic mechanism for the chlorite-iodide reaction and the initi...

Large molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids are crucial for life, yet their primordial origin remains a major puzzle. The production of large molecules, as we know it today, requires good catalysts, and the only good catalysts we know that can accomplish this task consist of large molecules. Thus the origin of large molecules is a chicken and egg problem in chemistry. Here we present a m...

Intracellular biochemical reactions exhibit a rich dynamical phenomenology which cannot be explained within the framework of mean-field rate equations and additive noise. Here, we show that the presence of metastable states and radically different time scales are general features of a broad class of autocatalytic reaction networks, and that this fact may be exploited to gain analytical results....

There is a tension between biology’s emphasis on perpetuation and the change required by biologically-inspired evolutionary algorithms. But there were radical changes when life first emerged from a prebiotic soup of chemicals. We investigate the possibility of taking ideas about the origin of life to develop a novel general purpose constructive search technique, inspired by ideas from autocatal...

We analyse the autocatalytic structure of technological networks and evaluate its significance for the dynamics of innovation patenting. To this aim, we define a directed network of technological fields (defined accordingly to the International Patents Classification), in which a node (source) is connected to another node (receiver) via a link if patenting activity in the source field anticipat...