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.

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 ...

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 ...