Did life start from simple chemical reactions? What is the nature of Life? I was reading about these questions in an excellent summary of the current ideas at Scientific Curiosity blog.
I bought a book many years ago and still haven't managed to finish it: Investigations by Kauffman. Nevertheless, I did read the chapter on autonomous agents (translation: Life) and his definition has stuck with me all these years: "a self-reproducing system able to perform at least one thermodynamic work cycle".
More like this
... a self-reproducing Turing Machine which can do work.
There isn't all that much news for a real obsessive
I spend a lot of time at a computer keyboard typing about biological viruses like influenza A, but computer networks are also subject to self-reproducing parasites of one kind or another and we continue to have a layperson's fascination with those organisms, too.
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -Robert Frost