I’m presenting very introductory Cellular Automata in CS6100 today.
I’m posting my slide deck here.
Update: the Game of Life simulator I used for the examples was called Golly (packaged with Ubuntu 8.10), and comes with many of the sample patterns I showed. The basic patterns I showed can be found on the Game of Life’s Wikipedia page and Mathworld entry.
The Turing machine pattern came with Golly, but is fully described by its author, Paul Rendell, on his website. Additionally, a similar page can be found for Paul Chapman’s Universal Minsky Register Machine (with Golly-supported pattern files).
The Wikipedia is also quite thorough with its discussion of Rule 110 universality, though NKS may have a potentially more accessible discussion (if you can handle it).