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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Shortly before his death, Alan Turing published a provocative paper outlining his theory for how complex, irregular patterns emerge in nature—his version of how the leopard got its spots. These ...

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 ...

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 ...

More than 70 years ago, mathematician Alan Turing proposed a mechanism that explained how patterns could emerge from bland uniformity. Scientists are still using his model—and adding new twists—to ...