The unexpected emergence of complex patterns in an apparently unremarkable dish of muscle cells may give researchers a valuable tool for studying self-organizing systems.
Similar patterns are seen in bird flocks,silk pajamas, the Milky Way and even the stock market. For the last two decades, researchers have searched for unifying laws to explain how small-scale interactions lead to 
common behaviors in very different systems.
“This is a fundamental question of physics: How does order emerge? What is the basis of self-organization?” said Andreas Bausch, a biophysicist at Germany’s University of Munchen. “As a model system, this is as pure as it gets.”
Unlike biologists who use E. coli to investigate genetic rules and rats to study physiological function, self-organization researchers have few model systems. It’s not easy to put a starling flock under glass
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