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19,814 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures · 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 accessSocial Sciences

Work from home and employee well-being: a double-edged sword

Junjie Dong, Zhidan Tan, Y Zhang et al. · 2025 · BMC Psychology

BACKGROUND: With the advancement of globalization and technology, remote work has gradually become a feasible and popular work model, particularly with the rapid adoption of working from home driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. This shift not…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMaterials Science

Solar methane pyrolysis in a liquid metal bubble column reactor: Effect of medium type and gas injection configuration

Malek Msheik, Sylvain Rodat, Stéphane Abanades · 2024 · Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis

Solar methane pyrolysis in different molten media and reactor configurations was experimented to improve hydrogen production . Pure Sn, Ni 0.18 Sn 0.82 , Cu 0.45 Bi 0.55 , and KCl melts were compared at three different temperatures…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

CRISPR–Cas technologies in neurodegenerative disorders: mechanistic insights, therapeutic potential, and translational challenges

Raya Kh. Yashooa, Ari Q. Nabi, Shukur Wasman Smail et al. · 2026 · Frontiers in Neurology

CRISPR-Cas genome-editing technologies have emerged as powerful tools for precise DNA and RNA modulation, offering promising therapeutic strategies for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), Huntington's disease (HD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This review critically evaluates current CRISPR/Cas applications in neurodegeneration, with emphasis on mechanistic insights, therapeutic outcomes, and translational feasibility. Preclinical and early translational studies demonstrate that CRISPR-Cas platforms can correct pathogenic mutation

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine

Long COVID trajectories in the prospectively followed RECOVER-Adult US cohort

Tanayott Thaweethai, Sarah E. Donohue, Jeffrey N. Martin et al. · 2025 · Nature Communications

Longitudinal trajectories of Long COVID remain ill-defined, yet are critically needed to advance clinical trials, patient care, and public health initiatives for millions of individuals with this condition. Long COVID trajectories were…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Green growth dynamics: unraveling the complex role of financial development and natural resources in shaping renewable energy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Alhasan Osman, Mohd Afjal, Majed Alharthi et al. · 2025 · Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Abstract This study examines the complex interplay between financial development, natural resources, and renewable energy consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2020, highlighting the pivotal role of financial strategies in enhancing sustainable energy practices. Employing an array of analytical techniques, including panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE), fixed effects, random effects models, and panel-fixed quantile regression, we delve into the nuanced relationships among these critical variables. The findings reveal that while natural resources and financial development generally e

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Mutualism breakdown underpins evolutionary rescue in an obligate cross-feeding bacterial consortium

Ignacio J. Melero‐Jiménez, Yael Sorokin, Ami Merlin et al. · 2025 · Nature Communications

Populations facing lethal environmental change can escape extinction through rapid genetic adaptation, a process known as evolutionary rescue. Despite extensive study, evolutionary rescue is largely unexplored in mutualistic communities, where it is likely constrained by the less adaptable partner. Here, we explored empirically the likelihood, population dynamics, and genetic mechanisms underpinning evolutionary rescue in an obligate mutualism involving cross-feeding of amino acids between auxotrophic Escherichia coli strains. We found that over 80% of populations overcame a severe decline whe

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMaterials Science

Electrospun PLA/PVP K90 Biphasic-Release Sublingual Film for Motion Sickness Treatment

Wenwen Zhang, Qilin Wang, Wei Yi et al. · 2026 · Biomolecules

To overcome the limitations of traditional motion sickness medications—slow onset of action, short duration of efficacy, and poor patient compliance—this study employed coaxial electrospinning technology. Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and polyvinylpyrrolidone K90 (PVP K90) were used as composite carrier materials. The sheath layer is composed of highly hydrophilic PVP K90, loaded with the antihistamine diphenhydramine (DPH). The core layer, composed of biodegradable PLA with excellent sustained-release properties, carries the anticholinergic drug scopolamine hydrobromide (SH). This core–sheath nanos

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

CNN based method for classifying cervical cancer cells in pap smear images

Remita Austin, R. Parvathi · 2025 · Scientific Reports

The absence of reliable early treatment serves as one of the main causes of cervical cancer. Hence, it is crucial to detect cervical cancer early. The biggest challenge in diagnosing cervical cancer early is that it is asymptomatic until it develops into invasive carcinoma. In medical applications, the use of machine learning and deep learning is successful as a classifier in the preliminary identification of cancerous cells in the cervical region. In our study, we present a CNN-based method for the classification of cervical cancer cells. We present a method for accurately classifying Pap sme

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Diagnosis value of targeted and metagenomic sequencing in respiratory tract infection

Yukun Kuang, Weiping Tan, Chaohui Hu et al. · 2024 · Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology

Background: Targeted next-generation sequencing (tNGS) has become a trending tool in the field of infection diagnosis, but concerns are also raising about its performance compared with metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS). This study aims to explore the clinical feasibility of a tNGS panel for respiratory tract infection diagnosis and compare it with mNGS in the same cohort of inpatients. Methods: 180 bronchoalveolar lavage fluid samples were collected and sent to two centers for mNGS and tNGS blinded tests, respectively. The concordance between pathogen reports of both methods and th

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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 ReportOpen accessPsychology

SΔϕ-60 — Utilitarian Subject-Splitting Index

Sofience · 2026 · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)

SΔϕ-60 introduces the Utilitarian Subject-Splitting Index, USSI, within the Sofience-Δϕ Formalism. The paper examines whether utilitarian calculation merely evaluates the happiness of already-existing majorities and minorities, or whether such calculation can first produce the operational boundary between majority and minority by redistributing Transition Completion Cost, TCC. The document begins with the Sofience Subject Thought Experiment. A person is imagined as capable of detaching and reattaching any part of the body while the detached parts remain alive, neurologically connected, and phy

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine

Home-Based Prehabilitation for Older Surgical Patients With Frailty

Daniel I. McIsaac, Susan M. Lee, Dean Fergusson et al. · 2025 · JAMA Surgery

Importance: Explanatory trials suggest that prehabilitation has efficacy in improving surgical outcomes. The effectiveness of offering home-based prehabilitation across multiple centers and for older adults with frailty remains unknown. Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of offering coach-supported, home-based prehabilitation to older surgical patients with frailty. Design, Setting, and Participants: This study is a pragmatic, parallel-arm, multicenter randomized clinical trial with embedded qualitative assessment. Clinicians and assessors were fully blinded; participants were partially

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessSocial Sciences

Increasing women’s empowerment: Evaluating two interventions in Uganda

Kate Ambler, Kelly Jones, Michael O’Sullivan · 2025 · Journal of Development Economics

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to test a novel intervention for increasing women’s empowerment in Uganda. The intervention includes a within-household transfer of a productive asset, which has a lower cost than an external…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Resolution limit of the eye — how many pixels can we see?

Maliha Ashraf, Alexandre Chapiro, Rafał Mantiuk · 2025 · Nature Communications

As large engineering efforts go towards improving the resolution of mobile, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) displays, it is important to know the maximum resolution at which further improvements bring no noticeable benefit. This limit is often referred to as the retinal resolution, although the limiting factor may not necessarily be attributed to the retina. To determine the ultimate resolution at which an image appears sharp to our eyes with no perceivable blur, we created an experimental setup with a sliding display, which allows for continuous control of the resolution. The

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMaterials Science

Fast Dissolving Resveratrol–Polyvinylpyrrolidone Nanofibrous Films Fabricated in Bulk Using a Special Hole Electrospinning Technique

Qiuyun Guo, He Lv, Ran Dong et al. · 2026 · Polymers

Batch production of nanomaterials is highly desired for developing commercial nanoproducts. Here, a brand-new electrospinning method, termed hole electrospinning, was developed for batch production of drug-loaded polymeric nanofibers. Using resveratrol and polyvinylpyrrolidone as model drug and filament-forming matrix, respectively, both hole and single-needle electrospinning were conducted. The resultant nanofibrous films were compared in terms of morphology, physical and thermal properties, mechanical performance, fast-dissolution rate, and antioxidant activity. Analytical and characterizati

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Does metaverse improve recommendations quality and customer trust? A user-centric evaluation framework based on the cognitive-affective-behavioural theory

Rabab Ali Abumalloh, Mehrbakhsh Nilashi, Osama Halabi et al. · 2024 · Journal of Innovation & Knowledge

Recommendation agents (RAs) have proven to be effective decision-making tools for customers, as they can boost trust and loyalty when customers shop online. They can analyse large amounts of data using machine learning algorithms and…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Subthalamic deep brain stimulation in Parkinson׳s disease has no significant effect on perceptual timing in the hundreds of milliseconds range

Thomas Cope, Manon Grube, Arnab Mandal et al. · 2014 · Neuropsychologia

Bilateral, high-frequency stimulation of the basal ganglia (STN-DBS) is in widespread use for the treatment of the motor symptoms of Parkinson׳s disease (PD). We present here the first psychophysical investigation of the effect of STN-DBS upon perceptual timing in the hundreds of milliseconds range, with both duration-based (absolute) and beat-based (relative) tasks; 13 patients with PD were assessed with their STN-DBS 'on', 'off', and then 'on' again. Paired parametric analyses revealed no statistically significant differences for any task according to DBS status. We demonstrate, from the exa

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

A large-scale genome-wide gene expression analysis in peripheral blood identifies very few differentially expressed genes related to antidepressant treatment and response in patients with major depressive disorder

Anne Krogh Nøhr, Morten Lindow, Annika Forsingdal et al. · 2021 · Neuropsychopharmacology

A better understanding of the biological factors underlying antidepressant treatment in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) is needed. We perform gene expression analyses and explore sources of variability in peripheral blood related to antidepressant treatment and treatment response in patients suffering from recurrent MDD at baseline and after 8 weeks of treatment. The study includes 281 patients, which were randomized to 8 weeks of treatment with vortioxetine (N = 184) or placebo (N = 97). To our knowledge, this is the largest dataset including both gene expression in blood and pl

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

PRKCZmethylation is associated with sunlight exposure in a North American but not a Mediterranean population

Stella Aslibekyan, Hassan S. Dashti, Toshiko Tanaka et al. · 2014 · Chronobiology International

Sunlight exposure has been shown to alter DNA methylation patterns across several human cell-types, including T-lymphocytes. Since epigenetic changes establish gene expression profiles, changes in DNA methylation induced by sunlight…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Little Support for Discrete Item Limits in Visual Working Memory

Klaus Oberauer · 2022 · Psychological Science

Some theorists argue that working memory is limited to a discrete number of items and that additional items are not encoded at all. Adam et al. (2017) presented evidence supporting this hypothesis: Participants reproduced visual features of up to six items in a self-chosen order. After the third or fourth response, error distributions were indistinguishable from guessing. I present four experiments with young adults (each N = 24) reexamining this finding. Experiment 1 presented items slowly and sequentially. Experiment 2 presented them simultaneously but longer than in the experiments of Adam

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Negative / Null Result ReportBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Glycomacromolecules to Tailor Crowded and Heteromultivalent Glycocalyx Mimetics

Luca‐Cesare Blawitzki, Nina Bartels, Lorand Bonda et al. · 2024 · Biomacromolecules

The glycocalyx, a complex carbohydrate layer on cell surfaces, plays a crucial role in various biological processes. Understanding native glycocalyces' complexity is challenging due to their intricate and dynamic nature. Simplified mimics…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBusiness, Management and Accounting

Comparative analysis of family businesses with nonfamily businesses: Empirical evidence from India

Hima Bindu Kota, Ramanjeet Singh · 2016 · Serbian Journal of Management

Family businesses are fundamental to nation building as they contribute towards the GDP of any country and are also major employment creators. Therefore, family business management is an emerging area of academic interest. In this regard, comparison between family and non-family businesses has become an important area of research. The present study analyses the performance of Indian family businesses in comparison to non-family business for firms listed on BSE 500 Index for a period of 11 years from 2005-2015. Any firm with 40% or more promoter or promoter group holding has been identified as

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine

The intragenic epistatic association of ADD3 with biliary atresia in Southern Han Chinese population

Zhe Wang, Xiaoli Xie, Jinglu Zhao et al. · 2018 · Bioscience Reports

Biliary atresia (BA) is a multifactorial pathogenic disease with possible genetic components. As a member of membrane skeletal proteins in the liver and bile ducts, a haplotype composed by five single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on adducin 3 (ADD3) has been identified as associated with BA. However, limited study was designed to further elaborate the mutual relationship amongst those replicated SNPs to disease. We selected three susceptibility SNPs in ADD3 and conducted a replication study using 510 BA cases and 1473 controls to evaluate the individual function of the SNPs and further stra

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPsychology

Examining the reliability and validity of two versions of the Effort-Expenditure for Rewards Task (EEfRT)

Hanno Andreas Ohmann, Niclas Kuper, Jan Wacker · 2022 · PLoS ONE

The Effort-Expenditure for Rewards Task (EEfRT) has gained validity evidence from several studies. However, various modifications have been applied to the original version, which have never been compared systematically. In Study 1, we tested 120 healthy participants to directly compare two versions of the EEfRT. In Study 2, we tested a larger sample of 394 healthy participants to further examine the original EEfRT. We replicated the split-half reliability of both task versions. However, self-reported personality traits (e.g., trait BAS) correlated with only some task performance parameters in

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Large-scale multi-site study shows no association between musical training and early auditory neural sound encoding

Kelly L. Whiteford, Lucas S. Baltzell, Matt Chiu et al. · 2025 · Nature Communications

Musical training has been reported to be associated with enhanced neural processing of sounds, as measured via the frequency following response (FFR), implying the potential for human subcortical neural plasticity. We conducted a…

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Negative / Null Result ReportSocial Sciences

Temporal shifts in Americans’ risk perceptions of the Zika outbreak

Branden B. Johnson, Marcus Mayorga · 2020 · Human and Ecological Risk Assessment An International Journal

Cross-sectional surveys, despite their value, are unable to probe dynamics of risk perceptions over time. An earlier longitudinal panel study of Americans’ views on Ebola risk inspired this partial replication on Americans’ views of Zika…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Emotion in Chinese Words Could Not Be Extracted in Continuous Flash Suppression

Kaiwen Cheng, Aolin Ding, Lianfang Jiang et al. · 2019 · Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Previous studies have demonstrated the automatic vigilance effect for faces and pictures and have attributed it to the brain's prioritized unconscious evaluation of early evolutionary stimuli that are critical to survival. Whether this effect exists for evolutionarily more recent stimuli, such as written words, has become the center of much debate. Apparently contradicting results have been reported in different languages, such as Hebrew, English, and Traditional Chinese (TC), with regard to the unconscious processing of emotional words in breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS). Our cur

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