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20,211 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 accessMedicine

Microbiome modulation of tumorigenesis and immune responses

Yuning Chen, Ying Fang, Zibai Lyu et al. · 2026 · Journal of Biomedical Science

The microbiome has emerged as a critical, context-dependent regulator of tumorigenesis and anticancer immunity, capable of either promoting cancer progression or protecting against malignancy. This dual role is mediated by multiple interconnected mechanisms-including chronic inflammation, modulation of immune responses, and alterations in host metabolic signaling. These microbiome-cancer interactions vary across organs, influencing malignancies in the colon, breast, lung, and beyond. Clinically, the microbiome significantly affects patient responses to cancer therapies, particularly immunother

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

A single dorsal vagal complex circuit mediates the aversive and anorectic responses to GLP1R agonists

Warren T. Yacawych, Yi Wang, Guoxiang Zhou et al. · 2026 · Journal of Clinical Investigation

GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP1RAs) effectively reduce feeding to treat obesity, although nausea and other aversive side effects of these drugs can limit their use. Brainstem circuits that promote satiation and mediate the physiological control of body weight can be distinguished from those that cause aversion. It remains unclear whether brainstem Glp1r neurons contribute to the normal regulation of energy balance and whether GLP1RAs control appetite via circuits distinct from those that mediate aversive responses, however. Here, we silenced Glp1r neurons in the nucleus of the solitary tract or

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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 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 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 accessMedicine

Wearable Devices in Remote Cardiac Rehabilitation With and Without Weekly Online Coaching for Patients With Coronary Artery Disease: Randomized Controlled Trial

Ryota Nishio, Tomotaka Dohi, Miho Yokoyama et al. · 2025 · JMIR mhealth and uhealth

Background: Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is effective in preventing cardiovascular diseases; however, participation in CR programs remains limited due to the associated challenges. The integration of wearable devices and real-time monitoring offers a potential solution to enhance adherence to remote CR programs and their outcomes. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of a remote CR program using wearable devices and real-time monitoring with or without online coaching (OLC) in improving exercise capacity in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). Methods: We enrolled 50 pat

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine

Cathepsins in Neurological Diseases

Dominik Lewandowski, Mateusz Konieczny, Agata Różycka et al. · 2025 · International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Cathepsins, a family of lysosomal proteases, play critical roles in maintaining cellular homeostasis through protein degradation and modulation of immune responses. In the central nervous system (CNS), their functions extend beyond classical proteolysis, influencing neuroinflammation, synaptic remodeling, and neurodegeneration. Emerging evidence underscores the crucial role of microglial cathepsins in the pathophysiology of several neurological disorders. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the involvement of cathepsins in a spectrum of CNS diseases, including Parkinson's disease, Alz

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBusiness, Management and Accounting

Public Employee Pensions and Municipal Insolvency

Sean Myers · 2026 · The Review of Economic Studies

Abstract This paper studies how municipal governments jointly manage spending, credit market borrowing, and a public employee pension system. I model governments as levered investors who must meet non-defaultable pension obligations and…

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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 accessMedicine

Association of various insulin resistance surrogate indices with aging acceleration and future risk of cardiovascular disease in individuals with cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome stages 0–3: insights from CHARLS 2011–2020 data

Shu-Shu Han, Qin Liu, Zhiming Zeng et al. · 2026 · Cardiovascular Diabetology

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic (CKM) syndrome imposes a substantial global health burden, with most adults clustered in early stages 0-3. Insulin resistance (IR), as a core manifestation of metabolic dysfunction, is thought to…

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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 accessBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Impact of transfer learning methods and dataset characteristics on generalization in birdsong classification

Burooj Ghani, Vincent J. Kalkman, Bob Planqué et al. · 2025 · Scientific Reports

Animal sounds can be recognised automatically by machine learning, and this has an important role to play in biodiversity monitoring. Yet despite increasingly impressive capabilities, bioacoustic species classifiers still exhibit imbalanced performance across species and habitats, especially in complex soundscapes. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of transfer learning in large-scale bird sound classification across various conditions, including single- and multi-label scenarios, and across different model architectures such as CNNs and Transformers. Our experiments demonstrate that

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine

Doxycycline Use in Adolescent Psychiatric Patients and Risk of Schizophrenia: An Emulated Target Trial

Ulla Lång, Johanna Metsälä, Hugh Ramsay et al. · 2025 · American Journal of Psychiatry

OBJECTIVE: As many as half of individuals who develop psychosis had attended child and adolescent psychiatric services at some stage in childhood, highlighting substantial opportunities for prevention within these services if an effective preventive intervention were identified. The authors hypothesized that adolescent psychiatric patients exposed to doxycycline, an antibiotic with putative neuroprotective properties, would have a lower risk of developing schizophrenia. METHODS: This was an emulated target trial using nationwide Finnish health register data on all individuals born between 1987

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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 accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Politizando el consumo alimentario: estrategias para avanzar en la transición agroecológica/ Politicizing Food Consumption: Strategies for Advancing in Agroecological Transition

Manuel González de Molina, Daniel López García, Gloria Guzmán Casado · 2026 · Redes

The starting point of this paper is the unfeasibility situation of the industrialized agriculture model and the dominant agro-food regime. Building a sustainable alternative is urgently needed. In the last decades, a great number of agroecological experiences have emerged which constitute, by their innovative character, the vanguard of an alternative agro-alimentary system. However, these experiences are not enough to produce a change to upper scales of social organization and even for their own survival as such experiences. The main challenge that Agroecology has raised is to upscaling the ag

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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 accessPhysics and Astronomy

Limits on the 21 cm Power Spectrum at z = 6.5–7.0 from Murchison Widefield Array Observations

Chuneeta D. Nunhokee, Donald M. Null, Cathryn M. Trott et al. · 2025 · The Astrophysical Journal

Abstract This paper presents the spherically averaged 21 cm power spectrum derived from Epoch of Reionization (EoR) observations conducted with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). The analysis uses EoR0-field data, centered at (R.A. = 0 h , decl. = −27 ∘ ), collected between 2013 and 2023. Building on the improved methodology described in C. M. Trott et al. (2024), we incorporate additional data quality control techniques introduced in C. D. Nunhokee (2020). We report the lowest-power-level limits on the EoR power spectrum at redshifts z = 6.5, z = 6.8, and z = 7.0. These power levels, measur

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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 accessMedicine

The Added Value of Prostate-specific Membrane Antigen Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography to Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Local Staging of Prostate Cancer in Patients Undergoing Radical Prostatectomy

Timo F. W. Soeterik, Joris G. Heetman, Rick Hermsen et al. · 2024 · European Urology Oncology

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: The role of prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-based positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) in addition to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for local staging of prostate cancer (PC) has been poorly addressed so far. Our aim was to assess the diagnostic accuracy of PSMA PET/CT and MRI, alone and combined, for detection of extraprostatic extension (EPE) and seminal vesicle invasion (SVI) in PC. METHODS: We conducted a multicenter retrospective study evaluating patients undergoing PSMA PET/CT and MRI before radical prostatectomy. The sensitivi

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessArts and Humanities

Model-based feedback in digital writing: effects on young EFL learners’ writing processes and text features

Raquel Criado Sánchez, Aitor Garcés-Manzanera, Rosa M. Manchón · 2026 · Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education

Abstract This study examined the effects of model texts on the writing processes and written products of young English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in a digital environment. Writing processes were operationalized in terms of noticing and pausing behavior, while text features were evaluated using a five-point holistic rubric. Eighteen fifth-grade Spanish learners participated in a three-stage writing procedure: (i) an initial writing task (tracked with Inputlog); (ii) a noticing stage, where one group compared their texts to a model while a second group engaged in self-editing without m

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Faster Hamiltonian Monte Carlo by learning leapfrog scale: an offline randomized solution

Changye Wu, Pierre Pudlo, Christian P. Robert et al. · 2026 · Statistics and Computing

stands for empirical, leverages importance sampling to construct an empirical distribution on discretization parameters, thereby eliminating the need for manual burn-in diagnostics and online adaptation. The proposal distribution used in the calibration stage is obtained via a Population Monte Carlo scheme with tempering and relies on flexible parametric variational families such as normalizing flows. Once the calibration stage complete, the resulting algorithm defines a homogeneous Markov chain via a mixture of HMC kernels with a fixed mixing distribution, and hence preserves the target distr

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine

Macrophage metabolic reprogramming by vanadium released from glucose-responsive bio-gel accelerates diabetic wound repair

Jiangfeng Li, Zheng Li, 韩丽黎 et al. · 2026 · Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy

Dysregulated glucose metabolism in diabetic wound macrophages impairs polarization toward the reparative M2 phenotype, leading to compromised innate immunity, chronic inflammation, and delayed wound healing. However, effective strategies…

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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 accessEnvironmental Science

A Breath of Fresh Air: A Novel Passive Airborne eDNA Approach for Scalable Terrestrial Biodiversity Monitoring

Hugo Jager, Krijn Baptist Trimbos, Jan‐Maarten Luursema et al. · 2026 · Ecology and Evolution

Terrestrial biodiversity's rapid decline demands expansion of high-resolution biomonitoring to support science-based policy. Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis has proven effective in aquatic systems but remains underexplored for terrestrial habitats, partly due to point-source sampling bias and difficulty in upscaling. Air has emerged as a promising substrate, yet most studies use active samplers which tend to be expensive, bulky, and require power, potentially hindering broad deployment. We present a newly developed, inexpensive, reusable, and easy-to-use passive approach (Nutshell eDNA sampl

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Microbial diversification is maintained in an experimentally evolved synthetic community

Zahraa S. Al-tameemi, Alejandra Rodríguez‐Verdugo · 2024 · mSystems

ABSTRACT Microbial communities are incredibly diverse. Yet, the eco-evolutionary processes originating and maintaining this diversity remain understudied. Here, we investigate the patterns of diversification for Pseudomonas putida evolving in isolation and with Acinetobacter johnsonii leaking resources used by P. putida . We experimentally evolved four experimental replicates in monoculture and co-culture for 200 generations. We observed that P. putida diversified into two distinct morphotypes that differed from their ancestor by single-point mutations. One of the most prominent mutations hit

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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 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 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 accessComputer Science

Rapid Integration of LLMs in Healthcare Raises Ethical Concerns: An Investigation into Deceptive Patterns in Social Robots

Robert Ranisch, Joschka Haltaufderheide · 2025 · Digital Society

Abstract Conversational agents are increasingly used in healthcare, with Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly enhancing their capabilities. When integrated into social robots, LLMs offer the potential for more natural interactions. However, while LLMs promise numerous benefits, they also raise critical ethical concerns, particularly regarding hallucinations and deceptive patterns. In this case study, we observed a critical pattern of deceptive behavior in commercially available LLM-based care software integrated into robots. The LLM-equipped robot falsely claimed to have medication remin

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