View Full Profile. Learn about our Editorial Policies. Many a fable and tale propose preposterous theories about how the zebra got its stripes, but now science has finally provided a possible answer.

This story appears in the July 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine. If a zebra zigs, will its stripes make a predator zag? That’s the idea behind motion dazzle, a century-old hypothesis ...

Today, we know that Turing patterns are responsible for things like zebra stripes and leopard spots, perhaps even the arrangement of fingers on our hands. Analogous phenomena in physics can even ...