Wired News: Universe: Beige, not Turquoise: "Two Johns Hopkins University astronomers said in January they had averaged all the colors from the light of 200,000 galaxies and concluded that if the human eye could see this combined hue, it would be a sprightly pale green. That, they said, was the color of the universe.

But Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry admitted Thursday that their conclusion was wrong. They had been tripped up by flawed software that was uncovered by color engineers who checked their data.

'It is embarrassing,' Glazebrook said. 'But this is science. We're not like politicians. If we make mistakes, we admit them. That's how science works.'

The effect of the error was that the computer picked a nonstandard white from its electronic palette and mixed it with the other colors to come up with the turquoise. When the error was corrected and replaced with a standard white index, beige was the result, Glazebrook said."