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.

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 ...

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 ...

Alan Turing was a mathematician and logician who did important work not only in computing but in a variety of fields including biology. He developed a theory about the formation of patterns in ...

A team of researchers have expanded Alan Turing's seminal theory on how patterns are created in biological systems. This work may answer whether nature's patterns are governed by Turing's mathematical ...

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 ...

A primordial developmental toolkit shared by all vertebrates, and described by a theory of the mathematician Alan Turing, sets the growth pattern for all types of skin structures. In 1952, well before ...

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 ...

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 ...