Via Andrew Sullivan, Ed Moses on fusion, as well as this video at the National Ignition Facility, which uses lasers to heat hydrogen to the point at which a fusion reaction takes place:

The question, Moses said, is “Can we build a miniature Sun on Earth?” The recipe involves a peppercorn-size target of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium heated to 200 million degrees Fahrenheit for a couple billionths of a second. To get that micro-blast of heat, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses lasers—coherent light—at a massive scale. Laser engineer Moses notes that photons are perfect for the job: “no mass, no charge, just energy.”

Moses ran a dramatic video showing how a shot at the NIF works. 20-foot-long slugs of amplified coherent light (10 nanoseconds) travel 1,500 yards and converge simultaneously through 192 beams on the tiny target, compressing and heating it to fusion ignition, with a yield of energy 10 to 100 times of what goes into it. Successful early test shots suggest that the NIF will achieve the first ignition within the next few months, and that shot will be heard round the world.

To get a working prototype of a fusion power plant may take 10 years. It will require an engine that runs at about 600 rpm—like an idling car. Targets need to be fired at a rate of 10 per second into the laser flashes. The energy is collected by molten salt at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then heats the usual steam-turbine tea kettle to generate electricity. The engine could operate at the scale of a standard 1-gigawatt coal or nuclear plant, or it could be scaled down to 250 megawatts or up to 3 gigawatts. The supply of several million targets a year can be manufactured for under 50 cents apiece with the volume and precision that Lego blocks currently are. Moses said that 1 liter of heavy water will yield the energy of 2 million gallons of gas.

Fusion power, like nuclear fission power, would cost less per kilowatt hour than wind (and far less than solar), yet would be less capital intensive than fission.

Also this talk by Steven Cowley, on how fusion is energy's future:

From The Nation:

“This is the only drama in Dickinson's life that's not of her making,” says Lyndall Gordon in Lives Like Loaded Guns, her account not only of the life but of the afterlife of Emily Dickinson, an afterlife that continues to be shaped to this day by the internecine warfare within her immediate family, their progeny and their associates. The writer of the thank-you notes is Dickinson, infamous recluse, the author of some 1,775 poems, almost all of which remained unpublished until after her death. The adulterers are Austin Dickinson, her brother, and Mabel Loomis Todd, who first laid eyes on Dickinson only when she was lying in her coffin but who became the first editor of Dickinson's poems. Austin's spurned wife is Susan Gilbert Dickinson, with whom Dickinson shared 276 of her poems, including many of her greatest.

“With the exception of Shakespeare,” wrote Dickinson to Sue, “you have told me of more knowledge than any one living.” Sue would eventually publish some of the poems in her possession, and her daughter Mattie would continue until her death in 1943 to exert her mother's right to do so. Until her death in 1968, Mabel Loomis Todd's daughter Millicent would exert her mother's right to do the same thing, a right that was perhaps unintentionally bequeathed to her by Dickinson's sister, Vinnie, who asked Mabel to transcribe the hundreds of poems found in Dickinson's bedroom after her death. Lies, vendettas and lawsuits proliferated: a drama of marital infidelity was played out over the dead poet's manuscripts with an intricacy that Henry James could not have imagined. The last major player in this drama, Mary Hampson (the wife of Mattie's companion, Alfred Leete Hampson), died in 1988. Until the end, she lived in the house that Dickinson's father built for Austin and Sue, the Evergreens, and the house has remained basically unchanged since the poet's lifetime. Dickinson last entered the Evergreens on the night of October 4, 1883, when she came to sit beside her dying nephew, Gib. Today, Gib's rocking horse still stands in a shroud of dust beside his bed.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Not everyone has a perfect sense of direction, whether they would like to admit it or not. But two new studies have found that even baby rats have a basic spatial framework in their brains ready to use as soon as they leave the nest for the first time—which is much earlier than had previously been documented. The findings reveal that not all sense of space is learned. They show that at least some of that sense is innate, “that the basic constituents of the cognitive map develop independently of spatial experience or might even precede it,” noted the authors of one of the new studies, both published online June 17 in Science.

For the two independent studies researchers record rats' neuronal firings as soon as newborn pups opened their eyes and began to explore their surroundings. Both teams were surprised to find adult-level cell function in some of the directional regions. At this age, “the animals would not yet have had a chance to explore the environment beyond their nest,” Francesca Cacucci, a researcher at the Institute of Behavioral Neuroscience at University College London and co-author of one of the papers, writes in an e-mail. “This suggests strongly that sense of direction is independent of spatial experience.”

More here.

Beauty is a fickle mistress. For the ancient Greeks it was a pale complexion, courtesy of a thick layer of poisonous white lead; for 16th-century Italians Titian’s well-rounded “Venus of Urbino” was the last word in female beauty; and today glossy magazines glorify wide-eyed teenage waifs. “Beauty,” wrote Umberto Eco in his study of European aesthetics On Beauty (2004), “has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.” Yet if the definition of beauty is ever shifting, how can we make sense of its significance? Perhaps the easiest solution is to dismiss the concept of beauty as human folly. Dostoyevsky observed that “beauty is the battlefield where God and the Devil war for the soul of man”, and others have seen our obsession with beauty as merely a flaw to be ironed out through religion or moral instruction. Vanity has been pilloried for its meaningless transience, from the Bible to 16th-century Flemish paintings. Rosie Boycott, a founder of the 1970s feminist magazine Spare Rib, hoped that women would become less obsessed with their looks, as fellow feminists rallied against the oppressive cosmetics industry which, they believed, forced women to aspire to be beautiful. But these criticisms have had no visible effect on our love affair with beauty. From the writers, philosophers and artists who have studied its meaning to the glossy magazines and cosmetics-obsessed consumers who fund a multibillion-dollar industry, for each generation the mystery of beauty remains a subject irresistible to scrutiny, as three recent books show.

more from Nicola Copping at the FT here.

Bissell was born in 1974, which puts him on the cusp of gaming’s generational divide. That transitional position affords him a perspective not unlike — if you’ll indulge the grandiose analogy — that of Tocqueville or McLuhan, figures who stood on the bridges of two great ages, welcoming the horizon while also mourning what the world was leaving behind. Bissell sees video games with open eyes. His book is about the profoundly ambivalent experience of playing them — close readings (close playings?) mostly of big-budget action and science fiction titles for consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation. These are the games most likely to draw a disparaging remark from a United States senator or a newspaper film critic. “Extra Lives” is a celebration of why they matter, but it is also a jeremiad about “why they do not matter more.” Bissel, a contributing editor at Har­per’s Magazine who teaches fiction writing at Portland State University, cops to spending more than 200 hours playing one game, some 80 hours another. “The pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar,” he writes. “Today, the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games.” He says this despite encountering “appalling” dialogue, despite hearing actors give line readings of “autistic miscalculation,” despite despairing over the sense that gamers and game designers have embraced “an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization.” Despite all this, the interactive nature of video games enables moments that Bissell calls “as gripping as any fiction I have come across.”

more from Chris Suellentrop at the NYT here.

“Revolver,” on the other hand, unfurls at breakneck speed, with an unhinged, almost drunken vigor to the deliberately rough drawings. Though the plot is fairly involved, it never feels claustrophobic. Thanks in part to Kindt’s unadorned, noir-inflected writing, Sam’s existential dilemma is as exciting as watching him and Jan kick in doors and elude snipers. As I read “Revolver,” I couldn’t help thinking of the more famous “Revolver,” the Beatles’ landmark 1966 album. Devin McKinney’s description of it, in “Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History,” as a sort of pop schizophrenia, seems not irrelevant to the subject at hand. “Revolver” is multicolored music in a black-and-white wrapper, terse pop songs of dream, escape, cynicism, forebodings… By its exploratory nature an affirmation of life and possibility, a bold and radical advance upon the new horizon, the album was at the same time fourteen kinds of oblivion served on a Top 40 platter: nostalgic about what had been, and paranoid about what it saw coming.

more from Ed Park at the LAT here.

In the NYT:

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation and a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87. The cause was multiple organ failure after a long illness, the José Saramago Foundation said in an announcement on its Web site.

Mr. Saramago, a tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness.” (A film adaptation of “Blindness” by the Brazilian director Fernando Mireilles was released in 2008.)

Mr. Saramago was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, his friend and editor, Zeferino Coelho, said.

Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years he used his status as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.

Scott McLemee reviews H. Aram Veeser's Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (via Henry Farrell in Crooked Timber):

[T]wo or three generations of young radical intellectuals have now had the pleasure of discovering that they are ever so much more radical than Edward Said. It must be very pleasant for them, but none of them has yet amounted to a replacement. With H. Aram Veeser's Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism, we have a different sort of Oedipal drama on display. The stakes are less political than personal. It is an insightful book, but also a strange one, charged with an ambivalence towards its subject that is perhaps as intense as Said's toward the works he discussed in Orientalism or Culture and Imperialism.

Part biography, part critical study, part memoir, this is the work of someone who has spent decades reading and thinking about Said—but also yelling at him, at least in his head. Admiration and hostility are blended together so thoroughly that one doubts even the author can tell them apart. Insight and grievance jostle for space. The familiar apparatus of academic writing (citations, endnotes, bibliography) just barely holds the volume together. This seems appropriate: most of Said's own books were collections of essays, or so loosely organized that they might as well have been. Even in its peculiarities, Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism is an homage to its subject.

It is also the record of a relationship—one best characterized, perhaps, by that Facebook phrase “It's complicated.”

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

by Seamus Heaney
from Death of a Naturalist
Faber and Faber, 1991

From The Guardian:

We hope you will find our suggestions intriguing, and that you will investigate the novelists on our list and let us know what you think of their work. We have selected, in no particular order, Chris Cleave and Mohsin Hamid for their superior thrillers; the Irish comic novelist Paul Murray; Zadie Smith, long a favourite of these lists, for her fearlessly inventive novels, Benjamin Markovits and Adam Foulds, for their ambitious lives of 19th-century poets; David Szalay, for his inventive take on Soviet history; the incomparably talented science-fiction writer China Miéville; Adam Thirlwell, for his brainy Jewish fictions, Rana Dasgupta, for his idiosyncratic fictional history of Bulgaria; Scarlett Thomas’s zany novels of ideas, Joanna Kavenna, for her nuanced treatment of childbirth, Dan Rhodes and Patrick Neate’s comedies, Kamila Shamsie, for her multi-generational Asian sagas, Sarah Hall’s assured meditations on love – and Evie Wyld, Steven Hall, Ross Raisin and Anjali Joseph, for their captivating first novels.

Now, may the debate begin.

The List

1 Chris Cleave (b 1973) His first novel, Incendiary, was about a terrorist attack on London and was published on July 7, 2005. The Other Hand (2008), a cross-national thriller set in England and Nigeria, became a word-of-mouth hit.

2 Rana Dasgupta (b 1971) Born in Canterbury, but now lives in Delhi. His first collection of stories was set in a Tokyo airport; his first novel, Solo (2009), was about a 99-year-old Bulgarian chemist.

3 Adam Foulds (b 1974) After writing his verse novel The Broken Word about the Mau Mau rebellion, he wrote his Man Booker-shortlisted study of John Clare, The Quickening Maze (2009).

4 Sarah Hall (b 1974) The author of four novels, the first two of which were set in the early 20th century in her native Cumbria. Her most acclaimed work is The Carhullan Army (2007), about a band of women rebels surviving in a Britain hit by environmental disaster.

5 Steven Hall (b 1975) His debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (2007) – about a man who loses his memory and tries to create a new identity for himself – unusually lived up to his publisher’s hype.

6 Mohsin Hamid (b 1971) The Reluctant Fundamentalist – a literary thriller about a Pakistani man who may, or may not, be a terrorist – came within a whisker of winning the Man Booker in 2007.

More here.

From Nature:

President Barack Obama says it. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), says it. University and research leaders elsewhere are saying it, too. The number one current rationale for extra research investment is that it will generate badly needed economic growth.

“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said Obama, addressing the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC last year. Getting down to the details, Collins has recently cited a report by Families USA, a Washington DC-based health-advocacy group, which found that every US$1 spent by the NIH typically generates $2.21 in additional economic output within 12 months. “Biomedical research has generally been looked at for its health benefits, but the case for it generating economic growth is pretty compelling,” says Collins. In Britain, senior scientists have called on the government to support science as a means of helping the economy out of recession. Heeding such arguments, governments in Germany, Sweden, Canada and Australia, as well as the United States, have increased research spending as part of stimulus packages designed to aid their struggling economies.

Beneath the rhetoric, however, there is considerable unease that the economic benefits of science spending are being oversold.

More here.

A few days before the Netherlands goes to the polls, Aicha Bennani is riding through the Dappermarkt, an open-air market in east Amsterdam that sells spicy Indonesian food, Moroccan fabrics and products from all around the world. The serious faces of politicians stare down from billboards, marked with the colourful, if confusing, initials of the main parties – CDA, VVD, PvdA – and covered again with bright flyers advertising nightclubs. “We never see the PVV here,” she says, referring to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party of the populist politician Geert Wilders. “They wouldn’t dare. We have a lot of students and artistic people here and they would just laugh. No, they go to places where there are no Muslims, where they can say what they like.” And with that, she smooths some of her hair back beneath her headscarf and rides off. Bennani is one side of the modern Netherlands, the side that most Amsterdammers are keenest to display. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she is a university student living in one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities. For the Dutch, tolerance is practically a religion, the embodiment of the local word gezellig which translates as being comfortable with each other, a rubbing along of communities that has historically allowed different religious and political groups to flourish side by side. No religious group comprises more than a third of the population, and no political party has won an outright majority since the First World War.

more from Faisal al Yafai at The National here.

I remember the view from a grave. Cartoon stars spiraled in front of my eyes when I hit the damp soil at the bottom. Up there on the faraway earth, past six feet of square muddy wall, a man and a boy stared down at me—my brothers, Gary and David, both laughing. Until I slipped and fell into the grave, we had been setting up the graveside for a funeral. Gary, 11 years older than I, worked for a funeral home; more than once in our childhood, David and I rode with him to pick up a corpse. I remember coming in the back door of a funeral home around midnight—the glare of fluorescent lights on stainless-steel tables, the smell of antiseptic, and another odor underneath. Only once did I actually zip up a body bag over a dead man’s nose. Once was enough. These mostly forgotten memories returned after I was invited last year to edit an anthology of vampire stories. “Vampire stories?” I repeated. Despite a secret fascination with werewolves—something strikes home for me about the need for anger management to keep you from going all beastly during a crisis—I had never really been a fan of vampires. I wasn’t reading the Twilight books or watching True Blood. I never even read Interview With the Vampire—even though I dated a psychic vampire back in the early 90s—and my Tom Cruise allergy kept me from the movie.

more from Michael Sims at The Chronicle Review here.

Few writers did more to propagate the idea of a singular genius than the young Goethe, yet few can have done more than he to cultivate their relationships to others. As the studies by Rüdiger Safranski and Gustav Seibt remind us, Goethe’s interest in other people often entailed a highly conscious, indeed sometimes stylized, pose that helped him both to place himself in the world and to perfect his art. Whether dealing with writers, scholars, scientists or men of affairs, Goethe knew how to achieve the maximum mutual benefit. That he was so often able to form a productive rapport with the leading figures of his day, notably with Schiller, his only competitor as a writer, and even with the Emperor Napoleon, says much about Goethe’s culture – a self-culture or Bildung which he promulgated in his writing. Intriguingly, both Schiller and Napoleon sought Goethe out, flattered him, and won him over by literary-critical discourse. Anyone who today doubts the value of criticism could do worse than examine these instances. Goethe himself did much to foreground them. He consolidated the public image of the friendship with Schiller by publishing the Goethe–Schiller correspondence, and recorded the meeting with Napoleon in a brief sketch, as in some suggestive references to the man he liked to call “my emperor”.

more from Jeremy Adler at the TLS here.

A couple of months ago, Robin had posted this. Lisa's a friend of ours, and if you can help her, please do by clicking on the ad in the right-hand column. Thanks.

One in four adults in the U.S. suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year—over 57.7 million people. A much smaller share of this group, about 6%, suffer from a severe and persistent mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder or major depression. My friend Lisa Guidetti is working on a documentary on the issue and is looking to raise finishing funds for editing and post production on the film. So check out the trailer if you're interested, and consider helping.

Lisa:

Lavender Hall is a feature documentary about a residential care home housing a wild bunch of irreverent residents with backgrounds from pianist to plastic surgeon. A family-run residential care home in an era of expanding corporate-run facilities, Lavender Hall is an anachronism. So too is its owner, Bill Kopec, with his drill sergeant-like approach to caring for residents. Founded and run by Bill’s mother in the seaside town of Wildwood, NJ, Bill struggled to keep his mother's dream alive after her death. After almost 50 years of caring for incongruous residents, most from Ancora, the local psychiatric institution, Bill Kopec is closing Lavender Hall. He managed the home every weekend on top of being a full-time Executive at Xerox. But with Bill now older than most residents, and no family member willing to take over, the home will be demolished to make way for condos. Numerous Lavender Hall residents battle serious problems. Linda, the youngest resident at 52, is a chronic alcoholic, bi-polar, with an eating disorder. Some, like Joel, have been at Lavender Hall for more than 19 yrs, and at 62 composes and performs dozens of original operettas and musical theatre works, despite his severe autism. This dysfunctional family of 14 residents will be made homeless in 4 months unless their only advocates, Bill Kopec and his daughter Renée, can navigate the medical insurance labyrinth to find them new homes. Lavender Hall is a frequently funny and occasionally disquieting portrait of the oddball residents and their equally eccentric carers. We reveal the challenges of the enduring life on the invisible margins of society, when you are considered either too old or too crazy for anyone to care what you do.

Lavender Hall’s residents represent two growing problems in the US: how to care for an aging population that cannot afford care for themselves, and the lack of support available to those with mental health or addiction problems, many of whom are elderly. Too many are housed in secure psychiatric units instead of having access to supported independent living or residential homes. And upon Lavender Hall’s closing, many of the residents could be re-institutionalized, overmedicated, and placed at the mercy of a system that erodes their independence and control of their lives. Normally off limits to cameras, this film’s unprecedented access to a privately run facility hopes to cross that threshold of crazy and breach that lonely aging divide. But as Debbie the Care Assistant warns, “If you're not crazy when you come in, you're crazy when you leave!”

Marc Hight in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Despite being hailed by the famed Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as “the most important thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century,” Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) remains an obscure figure to the Anglo-American world. This while notables like Heidegger and Husserl openly recognise their debt to the breadth and depth of Dilthey’s thought.

Dilthey is best known for his defence of the distinction between the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences; a distinction his positivist-minded contemporaries were intent on denying. Yet this defence is best understood as a part of his lifelong goal to provide a secure foundation for the human sciences. These include disciplines like history, psychology, economics and sociology. Dilthey asked what history and psychology and the other human sciences require in order to be done at all. That is, what is required to understand humanity? The individual human sciences are portrayed by Dilthey as inter-related and to some degree inseparable parts of a distinctive way of knowing.

Both a professional philosopher and a practising historian (he acquired some fame for his intellectual biography of Schleiermacher), Dilthey believed that historical reflection was essential to understanding humanity. He also believed that philosophy only has value when serving a practical end. Humans are constantly wrestling with pain, irrational upsets, and questions about meaning in the world. We all have what Dilthey calls a “metaphysical impulse” to find a coherent picture of reality (a Weltanschauung or world view) which addresses these concerns. Religion is one response to this impulse. When the response is governed by critical reflection, we call it “philosophy”. Philosophy thus serves an important role: to produce rules for action and empower those who use it by increasing self-awareness. Various religions and philosophies generate world views which seek to account for the world as we experience it.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

The upward spiral of artificial intelligence looks set to produce machines which are cleverer and more powerful than any humans. What happens when machines can themselves create super-intelligent machines? 'The Singularity' is the name science fiction writers gave to this situation. Philosopher David Chalmers discusses the philosophical implications of this imaginable situation with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Listen to David Chalmers on The Singularity

Evgeny Morozov reviews Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, in Boston Review:

The main argument of Cognitive Surplus rests on a striking analogy. Just as gin helped the British to smooth out the brutal consequences of the Industrial Revolution, the Internet is helping us to deal more constructively with the abundance of free time generated by modern economies.

Shirky argues that free time became a problem after the end of WWII, as Western economies grew more automated and more prosperous. Heavy consumption of television provided an initial solution. Gin, that “critical lubricant that eased our transition from one kind of society to another,” gave way to the sitcom.

More recently TV viewing has given way to the Internet. Shirky argues that much of today’s online culture—including videos of toilet-flushing cats and Wikipedia editors wasting 19,000 (!) words on an argument about whether the neologism “malamanteau” belongs on the site—is much better than television. Better because, while sitcoms give us couch potatoes, the Internet nudges us toward creative work.

That said, Cognitive Surplus is not a celebration of digital creativity along the lines of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman or Lawrence Lessig’s “remix culture.” Shirky instead focuses on the sharing aspect of online creation: we are, he asserts, by nature social, so the Internet, unlike television, lets us be who we really are. “No one would create a lolcat to keep for themselves,” Shirky argues, referring to the bête noire of Internet-bashers, the humorous photos of cats spiced up with funny and provocative captions. “Cognitive surplus” is what results when we multiply our constantly expanding free time by the tremendous power of the Internet to enable us do more with less, and to do it together with others.

Jacob Aron in New Scientist:

IF YOU found a self-replicating organism living inside your computer, your first instinct might be to reach for the antivirus software. If, however, you are Andrew Wade, an avid player in the two-dimensional, mathematical universe known as the Game of Life, such a discovery is nothing short of an epiphany.

When Wade posted his self-replicating mathematical organism on a Life community website on 18 May, it sparked a wave of excitement. “This is truly ground-breaking work,” wrote a fellow Life enthusiast, Adam Goucher, on the website Game of Life News. “In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.”

A first for the game, the replicator demonstrates how astounding complexity can arise from simple beginnings and processes – an echo of life's origins, perhaps. It might help us understand how life on Earth began, or even inspire strategies to build tiny computers.

The Game of Life is the best-known example of a cellular automaton, in which patterns form and evolve on a grid according to a few simple rules. You play the game by choosing an initial pattern of “live” cells, and then watch as the configuration changes over many generations as the rules are applied over and over again (see “Take two simple rules”).

The rules of the game were laid down by mathematician John Conway in 1970, but cellular automata first took off in the 1940s when the late mathematician John von Neumann suggested using them to demonstrate self-replication in nature. This lent philosophical undertones to Life, which ended up attracting a cult following.

Life enthusiasts have since catalogued an entire zoo of interesting patterns, such as “spaceships” that travel across the grid, or “guns”, which constantly spawn other patterns. But a pattern that spawned an identical copy of itself proved elusive.