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Browse the failure-mode index

21,245 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures. 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 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 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

The HDAC inhibitor romidepsin renders liver cancer vulnerable to RTK targeting and immunologically active

Celia Sequera, Margherita Grattarola, Floriane Cannet et al. · 2025 · Nature Communications

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are epigenetic regulators frequently altered in cancer. Here we report that overexpression of HDAC1/2 occurs in Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) patients, correlating with poor prognosis. We show that romidepsin,…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Optimising Analysis Choices for Multivariate Decoding: Creating Pseudotrials Using Trial Averaging and Resampling

Catriona L. Scrivener, Tijl Grootswagers, Alexandra Woolgar · 2026 · European Journal of Neuroscience

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) is a popular technique that can distinguish between condition-specific patterns of activation. Applied to neuroimaging data, MVPA decoding for inference uses above chance decoding to identify statistically robust condition-specific information in neuroimaging data, which may be missed by univariate methods. However, several analysis choices influence decoding results, and the combined effects of these choices have not been fully evaluated. In particular, an increasingly popular approach is to average data from several trials together before training an MVPA

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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 Report

Statistically-Based Trend Analysis of MTInSAR Displacement Time Series

Fabio Bovenga, Guido Pasquariello, Alberto Refice · 2021 · Remote Sensing

Current multi-temporal interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MTInSAR) datasets cover long time periods with regular temporal sampling. This allows high-rate and non-linear trends to be observed, which typically characterize pre-failure…

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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 accessEngineering

Assessment of Worn Textile Antennas’ Exposure on the Physiological Parameters and Well-Being of Adults

Khuzairi Masrakin, Hasliza A. Rahim, Ping Jack Soh et al. · 2019 · IEEE Access

This paper presents the assessment of short-term wireless body area network (WBAN) exposure, which is operated at the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band (2.45 GHz) in the vicinity of the human body. The experiment utilizes two popular textile antenna topologies, a planar monopole and a patch antenna as the radiating sources. The objective of this experiment is to investigate whether the exposure from WBAN may influence the physiological parameters (body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate) and the well-being of the wearer. Counter-balanced, crossover, and the single-blind m

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEnvironmental Science

Resolving a heated debate: The utility of prescribed burning as a management tool for biodiversity on lowland heath

Barbara Smith, Dan Carpenter, J. M. Holland et al. · 2023 · Journal of Applied Ecology

Abstract Lowland heath is a priority habitat for conservation, nowadays largely managed for biodiversity. Historically, prescribed burning has been the principal management tool, but there are increasing calls to substitute burning with cutting to improve biodiversity outcomes. However, poor understanding of potential impacts compromises decision making. Our study was carried out in the New Forest National Park, the largest area of lowland heath in Europe. Using a multi‐trophic approach, we compared the ecological impact of prescribed burning with two types of vegetation cutting (swiping and b

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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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Null DatasetOpen accessNeuroscience

Data visualization for inference in tomographic brain imaging

Cyril Pernet, Christopher R. Madan · 2019 · European Journal of Neuroscience

Tomographic imaging (i.e. magnetic resonance imaging [MRI], positron emission tomography [PET], X-ray computed tomography [CT]) offers a unique window in understanding structure-function relationships in the living brain. Nowadays, it is standard practice to acquire entire brain volumes and perform statistical analyses at each voxel, an approach known as statistical parametric mapping (Friston, Frith, Liddle, & Frackowiak, 1991). Because it is impossible to report the statistical results in every voxel, summary tables and figures are of importance. The choice made by authors to create such fig

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessImmunology and Microbiology

HIV-1 adapts to lost IP6 coordination through second-site mutations that restore conical capsid assembly

Alex B. Kleinpeter, Donna L. Mallery, Nadine Renner et al. · 2024 · Nature Communications

The HIV-1 capsid is composed of capsid (CA) protein hexamers and pentamers (capsomers) that contain a central pore hypothesised to regulate capsid assembly and facilitate nucleotide import early during post-infection. These pore functions are mediated by two positively charged rings created by CA Arg-18 (R18) and Lys-25 (K25). Here we describe the forced evolution of viruses containing mutations in R18 and K25. Whilst R18 mutants fail to replicate, K25A viruses acquire compensating mutations that restore nearly wild-type replication fitness. These compensating mutations, which rescue reverse t

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Replication FailureOpen accessMedicine

Transarterial Chemoembolization Combined with Atezolizumab Plus Bevacizumab versus Transarterial Chemoembolization Alone in Intermediate‐stage Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Multicenter Retrospective Study

Yitao Zheng, Yan‐Jun Xiang, Hongqi Shi et al. · 2024 · Journal of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Purpose: Combining transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) with systemic therapy has shown significant efficacy for intermediate-stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. This study aimed to validate the therapeutic efficacy of TACE…

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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 Report

The Fragility Index of Statistically Significant Findings From Randomized Controlled Trials Comparing the Management Strategies of Anterior Shoulder Instability

Martin S. Davey, Eoghan T. Hurley, Tom R. Doyle et al. · 2022 · The American Journal of Sports Medicine

Background: Debate centering on the management of anterior shoulder instability (ASI) in recent years has led to many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) being published on the topic. The fragility index (FI) has subsequently emerged as a…

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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

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 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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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 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 Report

A convolutional neural network-based anthropomorphic model observer for signal-known-statistically and background-known-statistically detection tasks

Minah Han, Jongduk Baek · 2020 · Physics in Medicine & Biology

Abstract The purpose of this study is implementation of an anthropomorphic model observer using a convolutional neural network (CNN) for signal-known-statistically (SKS) and background-known-statistically (BKS) detection tasks. We conduct…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Genome-wide association study identifies common variants associated with breast cancer in South African Black women

M Hayat, Wenlong Carl Chen, Chantal Babb de Villiers et al. · 2025 · Nature Communications

Abstract Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have characterized the contribution of common variants to breast cancer (BC) risk in populations of European ancestry, however GWAS have not been reported in resident African populations. This GWAS included 2485 resident African BC cases and 1101 population matched controls. Two risk loci were identified, located between UNC13C and RAB27A on chromosome 15 (rs7181788, p = 1.01 × 10 −08 ) and in USP22 on chromosome 17 (rs899342, p = 4.62 × 10 −08 ). Several genome-wide significant signals were also detected in hormone receptor subtype analysis. The

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