There’s a reason fashion designers look to animal prints for inspiration. Creatures have evolved a dizzying array of patterns: stripes, spots, diamonds, chevrons, hexagons and even mazelike designs.

“The Turing pattern is definitely important,” says Yipeng Liang, a biologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. But, he adds, “nature is more complicated than we thought.” This article ...

Learn how different animals get their stripes. Would you believe the answer is… math? This is the story of a WWII wartime codebreaker and his quest to decode nature’s most beautiful patterns. Alan ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. In nature, patterns of chemical interactions between two different ...

One of the things the human brain naturally excels at is recognizing all sorts of patterns, such as stripes on zebras, shells of turtles, and even the structure of crystals. Thanks to our progress in ...

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science ...

Desert plants naturally group in patterns that Alan Turing predicted in 1952. Polymath dynamo Turing is most famous for the Turing machine. Plants in Turing patterns are able to retain water and ...

In 1952, Alan Turing published a study which described mathematically how systems composed of many living organisms can form rich and diverse arrays of orderly patterns. He proposed that this ...

A new study has brought science one step closer to a molecular-level understanding of how patterns form in living tissue. The researchers engineered bacteria that, when incubated and grown, exhibited ...

Chris Konow researches the impact of growth on Turing patterns in the Epstein Lab. Turing patterns are named after the British mathematician Alan Turing, who proposed a mechanism for how ...