What are you saying, exactly?

Hidden messages. Could there be anything more innately conspiratorial? Books, films – entire cults even – have been based on the idea that within one form of document there nestles another.

Hidden in plain sight, this clandestine message becomes a thing of legend. Spared from the watchful eye of censors or mediators it must therefore, according to those who consider such things significant, contain some dangerous truth. Something so offensive to ‘the Man’ that it couldn’t possibly be tolerated in an overt form.

The art of concealing one message within another even has a rather important sounding name: Steganography. Paintings, books and music – most forms of art have at one time or another been mooted to contain some steganographic content amongst their ranks. We’ve all heard the theories of hidden symbology in da Vinci’s Last Supper, or the tales of masked lyrics in rock songs whose true horror can only be heard if the record is played backwards.

But surely scientific communication is free of such frivolity? Thankfully for us, the answer to that is a resounding ‘no’. Known as ‘Easter eggs’ to those in the know – in-jokes and hidden messages abound in the world of scientific publishing and there are two wonderful forms of clandestine silliness we’d like to offer as evidence for this.

First up, we draw your attention to the oft ignored ‘acknowledgements’ section of a research paper. Now, unless you are expecting to see your own name in here, it is unlikely you will have even noticed this section, let alone paid attention to what was written. Yet within there is a veritable treasure trove of hidden messages.

Biyu J. He provides the perfect example when she takes aim at the US government in her Trends in Cognitive Science paper The fMRI signal, slow cortical potential and consciousness. She writes that she would “like to thank the U.S. Immigration Service under the Bush administration, whose visa background security check forced me to spend two months (following an international conference) in a third country, free of routine obligations—it was during this time that the hypothesis presented herein was initially conjectured.” In. Your. Face George Dubya.

Personal beefs can also be aired. Published by the European Space Agency, the wonderfully specific journal Proceedings of The CoRoT Mission Pre-Launch Status - Stellar Seismology and Planet Finding carried a paper by M.J Goupil and colleagues in which they wished to “gratefully thank the programme National de Physic Stallaire for financial support.” Fair enough – a textbook acknowledgement; but they continue “we do not gratefully thank T. Appourchaux for his useless and very mean comments.” Do you hear that T. Appourchaux? We have no idea who you are or what comments you made – but consider yourself well and truly Easter egged.

Now, while they are not exactly cryptic, acknowledgements are the perfect hiding place for things you might want to slip under the radar of an editorial board – but there is a more overt way of laying an Easter egg…

Fantastically, five Swedish researchers have been inserting Bob Dylan lyrics into research articles as part of a long-running bet. It began in 1997, after Jon Lundberg and Eddie Weitzberg – both professors at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Karolinska Institute – published in Nature the paper Nitric Oxide and Inflammation: The Answer Is Blowing In the Wind.

Then came Kenneth Chien, a professor of cardiovascular research, who in 1998 published Tangled Up in Blue: Molecular Cardiology in the Postmolecular Era, in Circulation. Fast forward to 2003 and Jonas Frisén and Konstantinos Meletis begin to make things interesting when they throw their hat onto the ring with Blood on the Tracks: A Simple Twist of Fate?

With five competing rivals, the game is one and the stakes are high: the researcher to publish the most articles including Dylan quotes before retirement wins a posh dinner at a local restaurant.

And with a recent surge – The Biological Role of Nitrate and Nitrite: The Times They Are a-Changin’, in 2009; Eph Receptors Tangled Up in Two in 2010; Dietary Nitrate – A Slow Train Coming, in 2011 –  our money is on Lundberg and Weitzberg; a Dylan Dream team if ever there was one. That posh nosh is as good as theirs.