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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Patterns that guide the development of feathers and other features can be set by mechanical forces in the embryo, not just by gradients of chemicals. Turing Patterns Turn Up in a Tiny Crystal The ...

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 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 ...

History knows him as the man who outsmarted Nazi cryptographers, only to be chemically castrated and driven to suicide by the country he helped save. But in the final years of his life, even as he ...