This rather brilliant post from Martin Robbins’ The Lay Scientist blog on the Guardian website basically sums up what I (try to) do for a living. Those who can’t do teach and those who can’t hack it in the lab write… formulaically.

This is a news website article about a scientific paper

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.

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