Coulais and Vitelli developed their odd modules without mimicking any specific living system, so it’s an open question whether biology has made use of the same emergent dynamics. M. Cristina Marchetti, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called the result “very interesting,” and said the next step to understanding its possible role in biology is to see how well the behavior persists in a noisy environment like that of a living cell.
