In the 1950s Boris Belousov watched a solution flip red, then clear, over and over. Editors rejected his paper: a reaction that keeps oscillating seemed to break thermodynamics. He was vindicated only decades later.
See it happen: a beaker of colorless chemicals flips between red and blue again and again, like a chemical heartbeat.
Bromate, malonic acid and a metal catalyst cycling through oxidation states instead of settling into a single equilibrium.
The Soviet scientist who found it in the 1950s, couldn't get published, and left chemistry before the world caught up.
Handed the 'impossible' reaction in 1961, the graduate student nailed down the mechanism and gave it the other half of its name.
How can a reaction run backward and forward on a schedule? A tour of chemical clocks and the feedback loops behind them.
Reactions whose concentrations swing on a timer, from the classic iodine clock to the whole BZ family of oscillators.
The same reaction-diffusion math that paints spirals in a dish may, as Alan Turing argued, draw the spots and stripes on animals.
Ilya Prigogine's Nobel-winning idea: pulsing, self-organizing structures can arise when energy keeps flowing through a system.