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.

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 ...

A mixture of two types of pigment-producing cells undergoes diffusiophoretic transport to self-assemble into a hexagonal pattern. Credit: Siamak Mirfendereski and Ankur Gupta/CU Boulder A zebra’s ...

Turing also turned his math skills to understanding how regular features could emerge on the developing embryo. Scientists since then have applied his equations to the development of such patterns as ...