A Vanadium-based Chemical Oscillator

Nature abounds with examples of aperiodic functions such as hormonal, daily, and seasonal cycles and cardiac rhythms, but establishing a chemical basis of these oscillations has been difficult. Efforts to provide chemical models for the study of oscillating phenomena have focused on halogen-, sulfur-, and manganese-based systems. We show here that a vanadium-based chemical system exhibits oscillatory behavior similar to circadian and other aperiodic rhythms.