Alan Turing is rightly famed for his contributions to computer science. But one of his key concepts—an autonomous system that can generate complex behavior from a few simple rules—also has applications in unexpected places, like animal behavior. One area where Turing himself applied the concept is in chemistry, and he published a paper describing how a single chemical reaction could create complex patterns like stripes if certain conditions are met.

It took us decades to figure out how to actually implement Turing’s ideas about chemistry, but we’ve managed to create a number of reactions that display the behaviors he described. And now, a team of Chinese researchers has figured out how to use them to make something practical: a highly efficient desalination membrane.

From hypothesis to chemistry

Many chemical reactions end up going to completion, with all the possible reactants doing their thing and producing a product that’s distributed uniformly within the reaction chamber. But under the right conditions, some chemical reactions don’t reach equilibrium. These reactions are what interested Turing, since they could generate complex patterns.