Some patterns arise simply or randomly, but others develop via complex, precise interactions of pattern-generating systems. Their beauty aside, the intricacies of these systems are inspiring the ...

New research revisits the Turing instability mechanism; proving mathematically how the instabilities which give rise to patterns can occur through simple reactions, and in widely varied environmental ...

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 strikingly patterned ornate boxfish has no lack of detail when it comes to its hexagonal spots and keen stripes — the intricate markings are so sharp-edged in the species that it had engineers at ...

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 ...

On a March day in 2023, Ben Alessio, then a research assistant at CU Boulder, was wandering around the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, California, when he clocked a surprising sight: a male ornate boxfish ...

Patterns of chemical interactions are thought to create patterns in nature such as stripes and spots. This new study shows that the mathematical basis of these patterns also governs how sperm tail ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Fairy circles are one of nature's greatest enigmas and most visually stunning phenomena. An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has now, for the first time, collected ...

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 ...