Hypnotic Art Shows How Patterns Emerge From Randomness in Nature | Science | WIRED

Hypnotic Art Shows How Patterns Emerge From Randomness in Nature | Science | WIRED: Turing called this the reaction-diffusion process, meaning that it’s driven by reactive molecules that can diffuse between cells. He called these molecules “morphogens”...

...a team of scientists based at Brandeis University reproduced the system Turing envisioned...

If Turing’s theory was right, then the population of cells would ultimately assume one of six different patterns...

In fact, this is mostly what the team found — they saw five of the six predicted patterns; but they also found a seventh pattern that Turing had not predicted....

Tomography of Reaction-Diffusion Microemulsions Reveals Three-Dimensional Turing Patterns

Tomography of Reaction-Diffusion Microemulsions Reveals Three-Dimensional Turing Patterns: Spatially periodic, temporally stationary patterns that emerge from instability of a homogeneous steady state were proposed by Alan Turing in 1952 as a mechanism for morphogenesis in living systems and have attracted increasing attention in biology, chemistry, and physics. Patterns found to date have been confined to one or two spatial dimensions. We used tomography to study the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction in a microemulsion in which the polar reactants are confined to aqueous nanodroplets much smaller than the scale of the stationary patterns. We demonstrate the existence of Turing patterns that can exist only in three dimensions, including curved surfaces, hexagonally packed cylinders, spots, and labyrinthine and lamellar patterns.