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 ...

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 ...

In our newly published research in Science Advances, my student Ben Alessio and I propose a potential mechanism explaining how these distinctive patterns form—that could potentially be applied to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Computer science pioneer Alan Turing first proposed the patterning mechanism in 1952. So the real question is if these mechanisms, once fully discovered, are sufficient to describe how we get ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...