Here is Craig Venter talking about his biography in Google. He has used the term artificial life to describe his work instead or synthetic biology as he should called but it’s not entirely his fault: we should have called artificial life computational theoretical biology or something like that.
Seed magazine has an excellent article on the Blue brain project; a project that has model one cortical column of a rat and plans to simulate the whole brain of a rat + an animat body and then a human brain. The simulation is done to get a model to check results with, to use it for engineering purposes and to understand the brain. Modeling something we don’t know about that much to understand it; doesn’t that sound like an alife approach?
I just found Karl’s Sims classic video explaining the creatures he came up with using the connection machine.
Just had another semicool idea that has been invented already. The idea was modeling wealth distribution using the same equations used in quantum physics to explain the electron distribution in different energy levels in the atom. I was wondering how come people talk about lower and middle class; can that be in a graph or something? And it turns out it can, just like electrons vs. energy levels in the atom. In this case the number of electrons are the population and the energy levels is wealth; stuff that can be measured approximately by salary. The energy in my opinion has to do with the money and time (time = money, therefore time^2 
) needed to train people for a higher paying job (ex. university). Ok so that was my idea. But it turns out there is a whole field that tries to use ideas from physics for economics: econophysics. There is even a conference on it. Here is an abstract of an article talking about exactly the same thing I said plus possible solutions to the problem!
