What Am I Watching?

was my first thought, 

 but it soon became apparent, reading the Sandford News, 

a trio of researchers at Stanford recently published an article in Nature that explains the curious attraction found in droplets of everyday food colouring, the paper is the culmination of hundreds of experiments that began in 2009 when Nate Circa was working on an unrelated experiment as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Circa noticed that when drops of food colouring were placed on a slide they exhibited bizarre behaviours: identical colours would find matches while different colours would seemingly hunt each other, Circa soon teamed up with Manu Prakash and Adrien Benusiglio who began working on a series of increasingly refined studies to understand why these single droplets appeared to mimic biological processes, resulting in behaviours that looked like chasing, dancing, or avoidance, one of the keys was the interaction of two different compounds found in food colouring: water and propylene glycol, 

Tom Abate writing for Stanford explains, 'the critical fact was that food colouring is a two-component fluid, in such fluids, two different chemical compounds coexist while retaining separate molecular identities, the droplets in this experiment consisted of two molecular compounds found naturally in food colouring: water and propylene glycol, the researchers discovered how the dynamic interactions of these two molecular components enabled inanimate droplets to mimic some of the behaviours of living cells', this complex behaviour is something called artificial chemotaxis which Manu Prakash explains in layman’s terms in this video,

the physical properties of these fluids give rise to this immense complexity of behaviour, for example, chasing and sensing each other, and very much what we call artificial chemotaxis, which is the idea in biology that one single cell can sense where its enemy is, and it brings up all its machinery, and it chases that enemy to try to eat it, all in a couple of drops of food colouring, amazing!