This month’s (March) editorial in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology discusses a theme familar to readers of Nautilus: colour blindness. From the editorial: “In the right image, which simulates deuteranopia, red and green are indistinguishable (image processed at https://www.vischeck.com). This cover image (original, Erin Boyle; processed, B. Dougherty & A. Wade), which might have greeted a deuteranope picking up our June 2005 issue, raises the problem of how differential color perception affects the way that people view and indeed do science.” NSMB has revised its format guidelines to ask authors not to use red/green contrasts in any diagrams, schematics or models; for primary data, authors are asked " to at least check the visibility of and, if they choose, automatically correct coloring using the VisCheck and Daltonize algorithms. " Further details, including the story of John Dalton in this regard, are in the NSMB editorial.

We hope authors of all our publications will adopt this advice, and as previously suggested by Joseph Ross, read the article by Okabe and Ito before preparing their colour figures.