Matter | Aliens
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Chapter one
Our Color
Culture | Genetics
Bring Us Your Genes
A Viking scientist’s quest to conquer disease.
Culture | Art
When Photographers Are Neuroscientists
Artists who manipulate photos capture the ambiguity—and beauty—of vision itself.
Culture | Anthropology
About Your Skin
What you should know about your body’s biggest organ.
Chapter two
True Colors
Culture | Psychology
The Girl Who Smelled Pink
A mother wonders if we are all born with synesthesia.
Ideas | Philosophy
Ingenious: Mazviita Chirimuuta
Color is a dance between your brain and the world.
Biology | Neuroscience
Sound and Touch Collide
There might be a little synesthesia in each of us.
Biology | Food
The Colors We Eat
Food color does more than guide us—it changes the experience of taste.
Chapter three
Palettes
Culture | Sociology
How Pantone Colors Your World
Why your wardrobe is wine-hued this year.
Biology | Psychology
What Color Is This Song?
Test your inner synesthesia.
Matter | Fine Art
The Quest to Mimic Nature’s Trickiest Colors
An artist struggles to reproduce the iridescence of the natural world.
Culture | Art
The Phantasmagoria of the First Hand-Painted Films
How the silent screen burst to life with color.
Chapter four
Seeing Colors
Culture | Technology
The Ambiguous Colors of Nanotechnology
Kate Nichols’ nanoparticle paints have changed how she sees color.
Ideas | Philosophy
The Reality of Color Is Perception
An argument for a new definition of color.
Biology | Animals
How Animals See the World
See through the eyes of cats, birds, fish, and snakes.
Culture | Literature
The Terrifying Uncertainty in Jeff VanderMeer’s Sci-Fi
How the best-selling author brings his incredibly strange worlds to life.
Chapter five
Natural Color
Biology | Animals
Chasing James Bond’s Hummingbird
I venture to Cuba in search of the world’s smallest bird.
Culture | Sociology
Have We Hit Peak Whiteness?
Our obsession with cleanliness is running afoul of scientific reality.
Culture | Technology
Encounters with the Posthuman
As bodies meld with machines, are we leaving ourselves behind?
Culture | Linguistics
Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language
The confounding consistency of color categories.
Related Facts So Romantic
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne
See All Blog Posts-
Biology
How Can Microscopic Yeast Draw the Nautilus Logo? The New Art of Bio-Pointillism
Behold this magazine’s logo in glorious living color! Each dot of pigment is a cluster of yeast cells growing on the “canvas” of a Petri dish.This organic painting was created by…
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Biology
Inside the Goth Chicken: Black Bones, Black Meat & a Black Heart
In the historical novel The Black Tulip, written by Alexandre Dumas, an honest and decent Dutch tulip fancier is nearly brought to ruin by his quest to breed a purely black flower. More…
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Biology
A Riot of Color Lurking in the Amazon
Imagine a tropical rainforest and the picture that appears in your mind’s eye is probably filled with green and brown. It’s true that those colors dominate the landscape, but a closer…
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Biology
Splotchy Cats Show Why It’s Better to Be Female
If you’ve never really noticed the wide range of colors that can adorn the domestic cat, you might want to spend some time skimming through the official color charts of the Cat Fanciers…
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