5 Facts About Colors That Will Change How You See the World

5 Blue and Green Are the Same Color to Many Cultures

Here's a picture of a Japanese traffic light.

And here's a different Japanese traffic light.

Is that blue? Is that green light totally blue?

It turns out that the Japanese word "ao" is used to describe both blue and green shades, and that historically the Japanese haven't really distinguished between the colors. Indeed, the world is full of languages that don't have words to describe obvious colors, and without a word to describe those colors, they're much harder for speakers of those languages to distinguish when they encounter them.

It wasn't until Japan was occupied by Americans following World War II that they began to differentiate between green and blue, and even to this day, the distinction might seem muddled to a non-native speaker.

4 There's a Shade of Brown Made of People

We don't often consider where all our colors come from, how we came to live in a world that's so much brighter than the drab brown land our ancestors walked in.

Pigments are made from a variety of sources, including minerals, synthetically produced chemicals, plants, and even the crushed bodies of insects.

Which brings me to mummy brown, a once very popular shade of brown pigment that was made from ground-up mummies. Yes, those mummies.

This is part of a bizarre trade in mummies that occurred in the late Middle Ages, when mummies were exported from Egypt to Europe to be used for a variety of medicinal purposes. And once you've taken the step of grinding up human beings and eating them, it's not much more to start painting with them.

Eventually the concept of morality was discovered in the early 20th century, and the practice of using mummies for painting faded away. There are even touching stories of artists burying their tubes of mummy-brown paint in the garden. When I asked them, art experts were uncertain whether there is any risk of these tubes of paint rising from the grave to avenge the crimes committed against them (most even refused to answer the question). So at this point I will state, with the bare minimum of rising panic in my voice, that you are a fool if you don't keep a gun trained on any garden you happen to set foot in.

3 We Can See Colors That Don't Exist

Color exists in our brains, and our understanding of it is inevitably constrained by the limitations of the tools we have to observe it, namely our eyes.

Our eyes don't just perceive the light as it actually exists; the three types of cones in our retinas respond to different ranges of wavelengths, and it's the combination of those cones' responses that causes our brains to perceive specific colors. How our brains combine these responses isn't completely understood, although we do have a good handle on the range of colors they can see.

And knowing the limitations of what colors we can and cannot see made it all the more surprising when some of our bravest eye scientists reported back from one of their expeditions that they had found ways to trick our eyes into perceiving colors that can't possibly exist. Called "impossible colors," these are shades that should be impossible to perceive under normal lighting conditions, and include a color that exists between blue and yellow (hint: it's not green) and something that exists between green and red (Christmas maybe?). Then there's the family of so-called chimerical colors, which use the tendency our eyes have of forming negative afterimages to generate colors that cannot possibly exist. These include the impossibly bluish shade of black with the awesome name of Stygian blue, which you can see below.

2 The Universe Is Beige

On one of the many cold nights up on the hill their job requires of them, a group of astronomers decided to take the light of all the stars in the universe, smoosh it all together into a box, and see what color the universe was. There was absolutely no scientific point to this; it's just the kind of thing people with a high data/friend ratio do for fun.

Anyways, it turns out the answer is beige. The universe is beige.

The scientists who did this work eventually settled on the name "cosmic latte," because caffeine is a very necessary part of astronomy, and who was going to stop them? So now we know what to order at the store if we ever need to freshen the place up a bit. Also, it's a nice neutral color, which should make the universe appeal more to buyers if we ever have to put it on the market.

1 We Owe Everything to Cyan

Cyan is the color most of us know as the one they keep painting aquarium gift shops in.

But it's also the color of a family of organisms called cyanobacteria, which you might not be aware are the most important life forms on Earth. Now, I know you think you're "all that," what with your multicelled body and functioning nervous system, but before you start strutting around the office, trash-talking single-cell life forms, check out this list of things that cyanobacteria have accomplished. First, they can fix nitrogen, which means taking it out of the air and making it available for other forms of life to use.

Second, starting a few billion years ago, they filled the atmosphere with oxygen, which we use for all sorts of things. Welding, for example.

Also, they invented plants.

They're still around now, filling the atmosphere with oxygen, fixing nitrogen for us to eat, and inventing new things -- super plants, I guess. Like plants with Wi-Fi or something. And they also sometimes bloom and kill everything around them, just to prove their dominance over us, I think. So the next time you see a floating puddle of cyan, show it some respect, lest it turn against you.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and loves all the colors of the rainbow. Join him on Facebook or Twitter to hear more of his colorful language.