"Living crystals"

Spontaneous formation of colonies of bacteria or flocks of birds are examples of self-organization in active living matter. Here, we demonstrate a form of self-organization from nonequilibrium driving forces in a suspension of synthetic photoactivated colloidal particles. They lead to two-dimensional "living crystals," which form, break, explode, and reform elsewhere...

-- from Living Crystals of Light-Activated Colloidal Surfers

Beyond reality and imagination

The Book of Imaginary Beings is a compendium of extraordinary fictions of the human brain.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings celebrates a few of the real creatures that are stranger and more astonishing than most of the ones that humans have imagined.

Nils Aall Barricelli was, perhaps, the first to explore another category altogether -- entities that are neither 'real' in the sense that most of us customarily use that term nor fictional -- when, in the early 1950s, he created numeric organisms based on Darwinian principles.

These organisms and the universes they inhabited existed purely as mathematical values. In Barricelli's mind, however, they were true organisms, not simply mathematical models of life.

Max Tegmark believes that physical existence and mathematical existence are the same, so any structure that exists mathematically is also real.

(see also Turing's Cathedral.)

Let's build a creature

The competition began in 2004 with five entrants. This year, more than 100 teams from all over the world have signed up.

--from Scientists compete to build best living machine.

An eye "very imperfect and simple"

The brittlestar has an entire carapace pitted with optically tuned calcite crystals.[1]

The photo is featured in a Darwin 'special' in Nature. The editorial says:

An even more likely development [in the next 50 years than the discovery of life beyond Earth] is that life will be created de novo here on Earth. The first experiments in whole-organism synthetic biology, such as the synthetic mycoplasma being worked on at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, will cleave quite closely to the designs already developed by natural selection. But there are already schemes for going further — for using different genetic codes, for example. Although the synthesis of complex organisms might remain the stuff of fantasy for some time, new ways of building self-replicating, one-genome, one-cell organisms seem quite plausible. The development of creatures born from an idea, not an ancestor, will undoubtedly provide new insights into evolution, not least because the proclivities of such creatures to evolve will need to be kept in check.

[1] P.S. 28 Nov: There's a note on brittlestars by Mark H at Daily Kos