Color patterns seen in fish and other animals evolved to serve various purposes. Lagunatic Photo/iStock via Getty Images Plus A thought experiment can help visualize the challenge of achieving ...

Turing also turned his math skills to understanding how regular features could emerge on the developing embryo. Scientists since then have applied his equations to the development of such patterns as ...

In our newly published research in Science Advances, my student Ben Alessio and I propose a potential mechanism explaining how these distinctive patterns form—that could potentially be applied to ...

Extending Turing's theory to help understand how biological patterns are created. (Image: Xavier Diego, EMBL) Alan Turing sought to explain how patterns in nature arise with his 1952 theory on ...

A mixture of two types of pigment-producing cells undergoes diffusiophoretic transport to self-assemble into a hexagonal pattern. Credit: Siamak Mirfendereski and Ankur Gupta/CU Boulder A zebra’s ...

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 ...

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale. The stripes looked like a ...