This has got to be the weirdest news story I’ve read in a while. The report is simple – a gang of robbers held up a train and made off with a consignment of cushions bearing the Playboy logo. The driver was unhurt and the robbers apparently stole nothing else.

At first, my reaction was to trawl from memory a slew of playground jokes on fake news items, such as

Yesterday an enormous hole appeared in the middle of the Balls Pond Road. Police are looking into it.

Thieves broke into New Scotland Yard and stole all the lavatories. Police say they have nothing to go on.

and the rather more developed items popularized by The Two Ronnies including (from memory, with elaboration)

Two cargo ships collided in the Channel, one carrying red paint, the other, purple paint. It is believed both crews have been marooned.

Edgar and Ronald Twinge, twin dustmen, got married today in a double wedding. After the ceremony the brothers carried their brides over the threshold, leaving bits of them scattered up the garden path.

Last night a thief broke into a chemist and stole a carton of eye drops. Police are looking for someone with sore eyes. In a related incident, a thief broke into a sweetshop and stole a jar of pear drops. Police are looking for a nude lady with a piano accordion.

and so on.

That’s when I asked Mrs Gee, who is a proper news journalist, to read the story. Her reaction was more sober: she suggested that there was a great deal in the story that we weren’t being told. Perhaps, she thought, the cushions were full of drugs, or diamonds. The thieves obviously knew what they were looking for, and nobody is going to stop a giant goods train for some tacky soft furnishings.

Or are they?

The report also doesn’t give any description of the robbers. I reckon they were heavily armed feminist rabbits, hell-bent on bringing down the Playboy Empire.

One cushion at a time.

Many years as a Nature editor has taught me the importance of reading between the lines. You’d think that a research report should be the plainest, most direct genre of literature imaginable. And why not, if its purpose is to convey research results succinctly and with clarity? But even research papers can be important for what’s left unsaid. The Case of Watson and Crick

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material

Is perhaps the most egregious example (the adjectival form used here is meant in the pre-16th-century positive connotation, which is the usage I fain desire, an I wot archaism as not in and of itself an errour, or so I deem, as well as in the post-16th-century negative connotation, which does not habitually commend itself to me. Pedants, take note). History has imbued this quote with the aura of victory – after all, history is always written by the victors. However, WC’s flush of victory might not have been merited at the time, because the precise copying mechanism was still in dispute, and one could argue that we’re still working out the details to this day. Papers positing a protein-based genetic mechanism were, I believe, being published even after the WC paper. So if W&C had empirical evidence for a copying mechanism, they should have set it forth, then and there, in that paper. People have often joked that WC’s paper wouldn’t have been accepted today. Whether or not that would have been true is impossible to say. However, I think that were I the editor, I’d have asked WC to come clean or cut that sentence. Cute closing sentences are all very well, but in a scientific paper you have to put up – or shut up.

One of the first things I do when confronted with a new manuscript is check the references, to see if the claims vaunted in the abstract are really only thinly separated from papers the author or others have published, or have under consideration elsewhere. That being satisfied, I go for the jugular – straight for the scientific nuts and bolts of the argument – to see if the actual substance of the paper merits the sauce of abstract and conclusions in which the author has dressed it. Is this the fundamental, conceptual advance the authors claim, or just a rather small (if worthy) advance that could have easily been predicted, and which would be of interest to specialists in the field?

When I first joined Nature, the then Editor, John Maddox, gave me a document summarizing his thoughts on how staff should conduct themselves. One of his rules was a ban on the word breakthrough (major was also somewhat frowned upon – major breakthrough, practically a hanging offence), and I can remember his justification, almost word for word.

Most scientific discoveries represent the addition of a single brick to a wall that’s already huge. The really big discoveries represent the addition of two bricks at once.

Given the volume of papers submitted to Nature, very few are going to represent a discovery of earth-shaking importance, even though most of them are perfectly fine pieces of work, in their way. But when a new manuscript arrives on my screen, my first thought is not to admire the Playboy cushions in and of themselves, but to wonder what’s inside them that makes them so special?