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Browse the failure-mode index

40 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Earth and Planetary 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 accessEarth and Planetary Sciences

Revising the Giant Planet Mass–Metallicity Relation: Deciphering the Formation Sequence of Giant Planets

Yayaati Chachan, Jonathan J. Fortney, Kazumasa Ohno et al. · 2025 · The Astrophysical Journal

Abstract The rate at which giant planets accumulate solids and gas is a critical component of planet formation models, yet it is extremely challenging to predict from first principles. Characterizing the heavy element (everything other than hydrogen and helium) content of giant planets provides important clues about their provenance. Using thermal evolution models with an updated H–He equation of state and atmospheric boundary conditions that vary with envelope metallicity, we quantify the bulk heavy element content of 147 warm (<1000 K) giant planets with well-measured masses and radii, mo

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEarth and Planetary Sciences

Evolutionary assembly of crown reptile anatomy clarified by late Paleozoic relatives of Neodiapsida

Xavier A. Jenkins, Roger Benson, David P. Ford et al. · 2025 · Peer Community Journal

Living reptiles include more than 20,000 species with disparate ecologies. Direct anatomical evidence from Neodiapsida, which includes the reptile crown-group and its closest extinct relatives, shows that this diversity originates from a single common ancestor that lived over 255 million years ago in the Paleozoic. However, the evolutionary assembly of crown reptile traits is poorly understood due to the lack of anatomically close relatives of Neodiapsida. We present a substantially revised phylogenetic hypothesis, informed by new anatomical data from high-resolution synchrotron tomography of

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Negative / Null Result ReportEarth and Planetary Sciences

Tornadic Supercell Environments Analyzed Using Surface and Reanalysis Data: A Spatiotemporal Relational Data-Mining Approach

David John Gagne, Amy McGovern, Jeffrey B. Basara et al. · 2012 · Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology

Abstract Oklahoma Mesonet surface data and North American Regional Reanalysis data were integrated with the tracks of over 900 tornadic and nontornadic supercell thunderstorms in Oklahoma from 1994 to 2003 to observe the evolution of…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEarth and Planetary Sciences

Biogeography and community stability of leaf endophytic diazotrophs in mangrove Kandelia obovata

Qinghua Hou, Rajapakshalage Thashikala Nethmini, Feng Qi et al. · 2026 · Communications Biology

The leaf endosphere hosts diazotrophs vital for plant health and ecosystem resilience in saline environments. However, the geographic pattern and stability of the diazotrophic community in coastal salt marshes ecosystems are poorly…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEarth and Planetary Sciences

Investigating the quadrupedal abilities of Scutellosaurus lawleri and its implications for locomotor behavior evolution among dinosaurs

Lilian Anderson, Charlotte Brassey, Stuart Pond et al. · 2023 · The Anatomical Record

A reversion to secondary quadrupedality is exceptionally rare in nature, yet the convergent re-evolution of this locomotor style occurred at least four separate times within Dinosauria. Facultative quadrupedality, an intermediate state between obligate bipedality and obligate quadrupedality, may have been an important transitional step in this locomotor shift, and is proposed for a range of basal ornithischians and sauropodomorphs. Advances in virtual biomechanical modeling and simulation have allowed for the investigation of limb anatomy and function in a range of extinct dinosaurian species,

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEarth and Planetary Sciences

Confidence-guided cryo-EM map optimisation with LocScale-2.0

Alok Bharadwaj, R. de Bruin, Arjen J. Jakobi · 2026 · Nature Communications

Cryogenic sample electron microscopy (cryo-EM) maps often display uneven quality, with high-resolution features coexisting alongside weak or poorly ordered regions. Such variation complicates structural interpretation, especially for heterogeneous macromolecular assemblies. Here, we present LocScale-2.0, a context-aware map optimisation framework that operates without prior knowledge of molecular structure or composition. By leveraging general expectations of electron scattering by biological macromolecules, it enhances local detail and connectivity while preserving weak but biologically relev

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEarth and Planetary Sciences

Sweet and fatty symbionts: Photosynthetic productivity and carbon storage boosted in microalgae within a host

Andrea Catacora‐Grundy, Caroline Juery, Fabien Chevalier et al. · 2026 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract Symbiosis between a host and intracellular eukaryotic microalgae is a widespread life strategy in aquatic ecosystems. This partnership is considered to be mainly energized by the photosynthetically-derived carbon energy of…

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Negative / Null Result ReportEarth and Planetary Sciences

Dissipative models of swell propagation across the Pacific

Camille Zaug, John D. Carter · 2021 · Studies in Applied Mathematics

Abstract Ocean swell plays an important role in the transport of energy across the ocean, yet its evolution is not well understood. In the late 1960s, the nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation was derived as a simplified model for the…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEarth and Planetary Sciences

Comparison of water models for structure prediction

Bálint Soczó, Ildikó Pethes · 2025 · Journal of Molecular Liquids

Describing the interactions of water molecules is one of the most common, yet critical, tasks in molecular dynamics simulations . Because of its unique properties, hundreds of attempts have been made to construct an ideal interaction potential model for water. In various studies, the models have been evaluated based on their ability to reproduce different properties of water. This work focuses on the atomic-scale structure in the liquid phase of water. Forty-four classical water potential models are compared to identify those that can accurately describe the structure in alignment with experim

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEarth and Planetary Sciences

A D-vine copula-based quantile regression towards merging satellite precipitation products over rugged topography: a case study in the upper Tekeze–Atbara Basin

Mohammed Abdallah, Ke Zhang, Lijun Chao et al. · 2024 · Hydrology and earth system sciences

Abstract. Precipitation is a vital key element in various studies of hydrology, flood prediction, drought monitoring, and water resource management. The main challenge in conducting studies over remote regions with rugged topography is that weather stations are usually scarce and unevenly distributed. However, open-source satellite-based precipitation products (SPPs) with a suitable resolution provide alternative options in these data-scarce regions, which are typically associated with high uncertainty. To reduce the uncertainty of individual satellite products, we have proposed a D-vine copul

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