Turing’s ideas explain how some animal patterns arise. A spot-maker is the most basic version of Turing patterning. It involves two key substances, or morphogens, as Turing called them, that can move ...

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.

Nature, for all of its free-wheeling weeds and lightning strikes, is also full of biological regularity: the rows of an alligator’s teeth, the stripes on a zebrafish, the spacing of a chicken’s ...

A team of researchers at EMBL have expanded Alan Turing's seminal theory on how patterns are created in biological systems. This work, which was partly done at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...