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157 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Negative / Null Result Report. 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

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

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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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Modeling the mobility of living organisms in heterogeneous landscapes: Does memory improve foraging success?

Denis Boyer, Peter D. Walsh · 2010 · arXiv

Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on single trajectories offers the possibility of understanding how animals move and of testing basic movement models. Random walks have long represented the main description for micro-organisms and have also been useful to understand the foraging behaviour of large animals. Nevertheless, most vertebrates, in particular humans and other primates, rely on sophistic

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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

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

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

Does Antibiotic Resistance Evolve in Hospitals?

Anna Seigal, Portia Mira, Bernd Sturmfels et al. · 2016 · arXiv

Nosocomial outbreaks of bacteria are well-documented. Based on these incidents, and the heavy usage of antibiotics in hospitals, it has been assumed that antibiotic resistance evolves in hospital environments. To test this assumption, we studied resistance phenotypes of bacteria collected from patient isolates at a community hospital over a 2.5-year period. A graphical model analysis shows no association between resistance and patient information other than time of arrival. This allows us to focus on time course data. We introduce a Hospital Transmission Model, based on negative binomial delay

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