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Browse the failure-mode index

160 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Agricultural and Biological Sciences. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Efficacy of mannan-oligosaccharide and live yeast feed additives on performance, rumen morphology, serum biochemical parameters and muscle morphometric characteristics in buffalo calves

Muhammad Zeeshan, Saima Masood, Saima Ashraf et al. · 2023 · arXiv

The objective of the current study was to assess the effect of dietary supplementations of mannan-oligosaccharide, live yeast, and a combination of these two additives on growth performance, histo-morphology of the rumen, and muscle morphometric attributes in buffalo calves. A total of twenty buffalo calves (average weight of 25 kg) having 3 months of age were distributed according to a complete randomized design. All animals were individually stalled in the shed and were fed ad-libitum. Experimental animals were divided into four groups for 67 days: Control group(without the inclusion of diet

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Optimization and evaluation of a coarse-grained model of protein motion using X-ray crystal data

Dmitry A. Kondrashov, Qiang Cui, George N. Phillips · 2006 · arXiv

Simple coarse-grained models, such as the Gaussian Network Model, have been shown to capture some of the features of equilibrium protein dynamics. We extend this model by using atomic contacts to define residue interactions and introducing more than one interaction parameter between residues. We use B-factors from 98 ultra-high resolution X-ray crystal structures to optimize the interaction parameters. The average correlation between GNM fluctuation predictions and the B-factors is 0.64 for the data set, consistent with a previous large-scale study. By separating residue interactions into cova

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Emergence of Human-Like Attention in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers: an eye-tracking study

Takuto Yamamoto, Hirosato Akahoshi, Shigeru Kitazawa · 2024 · arXiv

Many models of visual attention have been proposed so far. Traditional bottom-up models, like saliency models, fail to replicate human gaze patterns, and deep gaze prediction models lack biological plausibility due to their reliance on supervised learning. Vision Transformers (ViTs), with their self-attention mechanisms, offer a new approach but often produce dispersed attention patterns if trained with supervised learning. This study explores whether self-supervised DINO (self-DIstillation with NO labels) training enables ViTs to develop attention mechanisms resembling human visual attention.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Feature interpretability in BCIs: exploring the role of network lateralization

Juliana Gonzalez-Astudillo, Fabrizio De Vico Fallani · 2024 · arXiv

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable users to interact with the external world using brain activity. Despite their potential in neuroscience and industry, BCI performance remains inconsistent in noninvasive applications, often prioritizing algorithms that achieve high classification accuracies while masking the neural mechanisms driving that performance. In this study, we investigated the interpretability of features derived from brain network lateralization, benchmarking against widely used techniques like power spectrum density (PSD), common spatial pattern (CSP), and Riemannian geometry.

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Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Speeding up disease extinction with a limited amount of vaccine

M. Khasin, M. I. Dykman, B. Meerson · 2009 · arXiv

We consider optimal vaccination protocol where the vaccine is in short supply. In this case, disease extinction results from a large and rare fluctuation. We show that the probability of such fluctuation can be exponentially increased by vaccination. For periodic vaccination with fixed average rate, the optimal vaccination protocol is model independent and presents a sequence of short pulses. The effect of vaccination can be resonantly enhanced if the pulse period coincides with the characteristic period of the disease dynamics or its multiples. This resonant effect is illustrated using a simp

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Seasonality of primary productivity affects coastal species more than its magnitude

Carlota Muniz, Christopher McQuaid, Nicolas Weidberg · 2024 · arXiv

While the importance of extreme conditions is recognised, patterns in species abundances are often interpreted through average environmental conditions within their distributional range. For marine species with pelagic larvae, temperature and phytoplankton concentration are key variables. Along the south coast of South Africa, conspicuous spatial patterns in recruitment rates and the abundances of different mussel species exist, with focal areas characterized by large populations. We studied 15 years of sea surface temperature (SST) and chlorophyll-a (chl-a) satellite data, using spectral anal

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Impact of temporal correlations on high risk outbreaks of independent and cooperative SIR dynamics

Sina Sajjadi, Mohammad Reza Ejtehadi, Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad · 2020 · arXiv

We first propose a quantitative approach to detect high risk outbreaks of independent and coinfective SIR dynamics on three empirical networks: a school, a conference and a hospital contact network. This measurement is based on the k-means clustering method and identifies proper samples for calculating the mean outbreak size and the outbreak probability. Then we systematically study the impact of different temporal correlations on high risk outbreaks over the original and differently shuffled counterparts of each network. We observe that, on the one hand, in the coinfection process, randomizat

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Optimizing fMRI Data Acquisition for Decoding Natural Speech with Limited Participants

Louis Jalouzot, Alexis Thual, Yair Lakretz et al. · 2025 · arXiv

We investigate optimal strategies for decoding perceived natural speech from fMRI data acquired from a limited number of participants. Leveraging Lebel et al. (2023)'s dataset of 8 participants, we first demonstrate the effectiveness of training deep neural networks to predict LLM-derived text representations from fMRI activity. Then, in this data regime, we observe that multi-subject training does not improve decoding accuracy compared to single-subject approach. Furthermore, training on similar or different stimuli across subjects has a negligible effect on decoding accuracy. Finally, we fin

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Inhibitory normalization of error signals improves learning in neural circuits

Roy Henha Eyono, Daniel Levenstein, Arna Ghosh et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Normalization is a critical operation in neural circuits. In the brain, there is evidence that normalization is implemented via inhibitory interneurons and allows neural populations to adjust to changes in the distribution of their inputs. In artificial neural networks (ANNs), normalization is used to improve learning in tasks that involve complex input distributions. However, it is unclear whether inhibition-mediated normalization in biological neural circuits also improves learning. Here, we explore this possibility using ANNs with separate excitatory and inhibitory populations trained on an

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Disentangling History and Propagation Dependencies in Cross-Subject Knee Contact Stress Prediction Using a Shared MeshGraphNet Backbone

Zhengye Pan, Jianwei Zuo, Jiajia Luo · 2026 · arXiv

Background:Subject-specific finite element analysis accurately characterizes knee joint mechanics but is computationally expensive. Deep surrogate models provide a rapid alternative, yet their generalization across subjects under limited pose and load inputs remains unclear. It remains unclear whether the dominant source of prediction uncertainty arises from temporal history dependence or spatial propagation dependence. Methods:To disentangle these factors, we employed a shared MGN backbone with a fixed mesh topology. A dataset of running trials from nine subjects was constructed using an Open

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