On a March day in 2023, Ben Alessio, then a research assistant at CU Boulder, was wandering around the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, California, when he clocked a surprising sight: a male ornate boxfish ...

Patterns of chemical interactions are thought to create patterns in nature such as stripes and spots. This new study shows that the mathematical basis of these patterns also governs how sperm tail ...

The strikingly patterned ornate boxfish has no lack of detail when it comes to its hexagonal spots and keen stripes — the intricate markings are so sharp-edged in the species that it had engineers at ...

Nature has no shortage of patterns, from spots on leopards to stripes on zebras and hexagons on boxfish. But a full explanation for how these patterns form has remained elusive. Now engineers at the ...