Colors are often essential to convey scientific data, from weather maps to the surface of Mars. But did you ever consider that a combination of colors could be "unscientific?" Well, that's the case with color scales that use rainbow-like and red–green colors, because they effectively distort data. And if that was not bad enough, they are unreadable to those with any form of color blindness. Researchers from the University of Oslo and Durham University explain scientific color maps, and present free-to-download and easy-to-use solutions in an open-access paper released today in Nature Communications.