READERS often point out the strange titles that grace some scientific papers. We have several favourites, but possibly the most bizarre reached us courtesy of Seranne Howis: “The idiot’s guide to the zen of likelihood in a nutshell in seven days for dummies, unleashed” has the helpful subtitle “A gentle introduction, for those of us who are small of brain, to the calculation of the likelihood of molecular sequences”. If that sounds like your kind of paper, you can see it at .
Howis’s email arrived with what we think was a signature line reading “Warning: I cannot be held responsible for…
