Decorative art in almost every human culture includes precisely repeated patterns such as stripes, checks, stars, lattices and knots.

ECONOMIST: Come up and see my etchings

"Complex colour patterns such as spots and stripes are common in nature but the way they are formed is poorly understood, " said Dr Kathy Schwinn of the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research.

BBC: A bumblebee extracting nectar and pollen from a snapdragon

Samuel Freedman offers dispatches from skirmishes in the war between orthodoxy and modernisers of various stripes over issues such as feminism, Israel and conversion interspersing them with shorter explanatory chapters.

ECONOMIST: You don’t have to be Jewish to live there | The

We are starting to see an evolution from typical static magnetic stripes cards to more intelligent devices such as EMV chip cards and NFC mobile phones.

FORBES: EMV Chip Technology, Secure Electronic Payments

Americans of all political stripes can agree on certain essential goals, such as how we must preserve the world's natural wonders for generations to come and how we must live in harmony with this world of finite natural resources.

CNN: 40th Earth Day a planet-wide movement

Many states practice it through the initiative or referendum process, and while it is used by all political stripes, the left shows no respect for the majority when it sides with the right on questions such as racial preferences, tax limitations and (at least until recently) same-sex marriage.

WSJ: Best of the Web Today: Fascism by the Numbers