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Failure-mode index

Search what already failed

A searchable index of real negative results, null findings, and replication failures from the published literature — so you can learn what didn't work before repeating it.

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record (title, authors, DOI) compiled from open scholarly databases, with the abstract shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed (e.g. Creative Commons); otherwise a short excerpt is shown for reference under fair use. WASTE classifies each work by failure type; classifications are automated and approximate.

21328 results · page 480 of 711

Short NoteOpen access

Additional file 2: of HIV-1 Tat-induced diarrhea is improved by the PPARalpha agonist, palmitoylethanolamide, by suppressing the activation of enteric glia

Luisa Seguella (2806498), Stefano Gigli (2806501), Luca Steardo (214519) et al. · 2018

PEA failed to improve diarrhea course in PPARα−/− mice. HIV-1 Tat (130 ng/Kg)-induced diarrhea in PPARα−/− mice, increasing (a) daily defecation frequency, (b) average daily number of wet spots, and (c) fluid accumulation within 7 days…

View details →DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.6025403.v1
Negative / Null Result Report

Scopolamine fails to demonstrate efficacy in depression treatment

· 2022 · The Brown University Psychopharmacology Update

The antimuscarinic agent scopolamine did not demonstrate antidepressant effects in a randomized trial that used an active placebo comparator and involved 40 patients with major depressive disorder. Researchers stopped the trial for…

View details →DOI: 10.1002/pu.30949
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen access

Renal fibrosis and inflammation.

Julianna Rugor (548251), Lukasz Przybyl (548252), Ralf Dechend (252651) et al. · 2014

Masson trichrome staining of kidney sections (A) showed increased matrix deposition in vehicle-treated dTGR. Relaxin did not reduce matrix formation in the kidney (representative images). The upper panel shows a higher magnification. (B)…

View details →DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0093743.g005
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen access

Box and whisker plot of HBV viral loads of the 71 HBV DNA +ve participants separated into the six serological groups (A to F), interpreted according to Hollinger (2008) with modifications [35].

Anna Kramvis (304621), Neil A. Martinson (198606), Trevor G. Bell (304619) et al. · 2013

“n” indicates the number of participants in each group. ALT and CD4 cell counts for each group are indicated in the table below the plot as “Median (Interquartile Range)”. Viral loads and CD4 cell counts did not differ significantly…

View details →DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0045750.g002
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen access

THE EFFECTS OF BOATING UPON LEAD CONCENTRATIONS IN FISH

Oates, David, David Oates · 1976

The concentration of lead in fish muscle tissue from lakes where boating is heavy and where it is prohibited was measured. The lead levels ranged from less than 0.05 to 1.35 ppm but did not differ significantly between those in the…

View details →DOI: 10.2307/3627294
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen access

Data_Sheet_1_Supplemental oxygen did not significantly affect two-year mortality in patients at-risk for cardiovascular complications undergoing moderate- to high-risk abdominal surgery–A follow-up analysis of a prospective randomized clinical trial.docx

Thomas Christian (2546665), Barbara Kabon (652817), David Emler (14540201) et al. · 2023

BackgroundIn relatively healthy middle-aged patients, recent studies have shown that supplemental oxygen did not significantly increase one-year mortality after noncardiac surgery. If supplemental oxygen influences long-term mortality,…

View details →DOI: 10.3389/fanes.2023.1108921.s001
Abandoned HypothesisOpen access

On the Singularity at Light Velocity

Nishida, Akira, 西田, 晃 · 2013

The Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect evidence for the wind of luminiferous aether. However, the fact that light propagates without affecting aether wind on the rotating earth means that the medium is also rotating with us. For…

Negative / Null Result Report

Study: Medical cannabis did not reduce opioid pain prescriptions

Alison Knopf · 2023 · Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly

State laws that allow medical cannabis to be prescribed and dispensed did not result in the reduced treatment of chronic noncancer pain, researchers have found. In the study, “Effects of U.S. State Medical Cannabis Laws on Treatment of…

View details →DOI: 10.1002/adaw.33870
Failed Experiment Report

Failed knee replacement: incorrect indication?

George Ampat, Emma Tixerant · 2019 · BMJ Case Reports

A 52-year-old woman sustained a direct soft tissue injury to the right knee following a fall onto the right knee. X-rays did not identify any bony injury. Physiotherapy decreased pain but instability persisted. MRI scans identified early…

View details →DOI: 10.1136/bcr-2019-230829
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen access

No Significant Difference Unless You Are a Jumper

Shrikhande, Milind, Fendler, Richard · 2012

Numerous studies show there is no significant difference between student performance in online versus traditional courses. Unfortunately, these studies are unable to identify how a given student would have performed in the other format.…

Negative / Null Result Report

Understanding why EmpaTeach did not reduce teachers’ use of violence in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp: A quantitative process evaluation of a school-based violence prevention intervention

Camilla Fabbri, Timothy Powell-Jackson, Katherine Rodrigues et al. · 2023 · PLOS Global Public Health

EmpaTeach was the first intervention to address teacher violence to be tested in a humanitarian setting and the first to focus on reducing impulsive use of violence, but a cluster randomised trial found no evidence that the intervention…

View details →DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0001404
Negative / Null Result Report

The examination of motivational climate and goal orientation in basketball players-who did and did not experience a sports injury

Ibrahim Bashan, Turhan Toros · 2018 · Journal of Human Sciences

Aim: In this research it was aimed if there is a difference between mastery-performance climate and task-ego orientation variables of basketball players who did and did not experience a sports injury.Methods: This study group consists of…

View details →DOI: 10.14687/jhs.v15i4.5503
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Automatically Finding and Categorizing Replication Studies

Bob de Ruiter · 2023 · arXiv

In many fields of experimental science, papers that failed to replicate continue to be cited as a result of the poor discoverability of replication studies. As a first step to creating a system that automatically finds replication studies for a given paper, 334 replication studies and 344 replicated studies were collected. Replication studies could be identified in the dataset based on text content at a higher rate than chance (AUROC = 0.886). Additionally, successful replication studies could be distinguished from failed replication studies at a higher rate than chance (AUROC = 0.664).

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

Improving Power Flow Robustness via Circuit Simulation Methods

Amritanshu Pandey, Marko Jereminov, Gabriela Hug et al. · 2017 · arXiv

Recent advances in power system simulation have included the use of complex rectangular current and voltage (I-V) variables for solving the power flow and three-phase power flow problems. This formulation has demonstrated superior convergence properties over conventional polar coordinate based formulations for three-phase power flow, but has failed to replicate the same advantages for power flow in general due to convergence issues with systems containing PV buses. In this paper, we demonstrate how circuit simulation techniques can provide robust convergence for any complex I-V formulation tha

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Perceptual compensation for tonal context in self-supervised speech models

James Kirby, Ioana Krehan, Michele Gubian · 2026 · arXiv

This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.0 architecture exhibits evidence of compensation for phonological context. We conducted a pseudo-replication of a perceptional compensation experiment on Mandarin Chinese tones, and compared the embedding similarities and probing classifier outputs between a purely self-supervised pre-trained model and a model fine-tuned for Mandarin ASR. No evidence of compensation was found in the embedding similarities of the purely pre-trained model. Probing classifiers showed some evidence of compensation in addition to the expected layer-wise improveme

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards Understanding Iterative Magnitude Pruning: Why Lottery Tickets Win

Jaron Maene, Mingxiao Li, Marie-Francine Moens · 2021 · arXiv

The lottery ticket hypothesis states that sparse subnetworks exist in randomly initialized dense networks that can be trained to the same accuracy as the dense network they reside in. However, the subsequent work has failed to replicate this on large-scale models and required rewinding to an early stable state instead of initialization. We show that by using a training method that is stable with respect to linear mode connectivity, large networks can also be entirely rewound to initialization. Our subsequent experiments on common vision tasks give strong credence to the hypothesis in Evci et a

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Survey

Robert McCarthy, Daniel C. H. Tan, Dominik Schmidt et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Scaling deep learning to massive and diverse internet data has driven remarkable breakthroughs in domains such as video generation and natural language processing. Robot learning, however, has thus far failed to replicate this success and remains constrained by a scarcity of available data. Learning from videos (LfV) methods aim to address this data bottleneck by augmenting traditional robot data with large-scale internet video. This video data provides foundational information regarding physical dynamics, behaviours, and tasks, and can be highly informative for general-purpose robots. This su

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Puzzling Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy Evolution (PUDGE). I. The existence of a Nube-like galaxy in IllustrisTNG

Nataša Pavlov, Ana Mitrašinović · 2025 · arXiv

The recent discovery of the most extended ultra-diffuse galaxy (UDG), Nube, has raised yet another question about the validity of the cold dark matter (CDM) model. The studies using cosmological and zoom-in simulations, which assume CDM, failed to replicate galaxies with the structural properties of Nube. However, the simulation box or the examined population of UDGs may be too narrow to fully capture the range of effects that can lead to the formation of such extraordinary galaxies. In this work we present a case study of a Nube-like galaxy from TNG100, the most extended simulated UDG examine

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

An Empirical Examination of the Evaluative AI Framework

Jaroslaw Kornowicz · 2024 · arXiv

This study empirically examines the "Evaluative AI" framework, which aims to enhance the decision-making process for AI users by transitioning from a recommendation-based approach to a hypothesis-driven one. Rather than offering direct recommendations, this framework presents users pro and con evidence for hypotheses to support more informed decisions. However, findings from the current behavioral experiment reveal no significant improvement in decision-making performance and limited user engagement with the evidence provided, resulting in cognitive processes similar to those observed in tradi

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Results and forecasts on cosmic inflation from weak lensing

Agnès Ferté, Kevin Hong · 2023 · arXiv

We highlight the role of weak lensing measurements from current and upcoming stage-IV imaging surveys in the search for cosmic inflation, specifically in measuring the scalar spectral index $n_s$. To do so, we combine the Dark Energy Survey 3 years of observation weak lensing and clustering data with BICEP/Keck, Planck and Sloan Digital Sky Survey data in $rΛ$CDM where $r$ is the tensor-to-scalar ratio. While there is no significant improvement in constraining power, we obtain a 1$σ$ shift on $n_s$. Additionally, we forecast a weak lensing and clustering data vector from the 10-year Legacy Sur

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Low Complexity V-BLAST MIMO-OFDM Detector by Successive Iterations Reduction

Karam Ahmed, Sherif Abuelenin, Heba Soliman et al. · 2015 · arXiv

V-BLAST detection method suffers large computational complexity due to its successive detection of symbols. In this paper, we propose a modified V-BLAST algorithm to decrease the computational complexity by reducing the number of detection iterations required in MIMO communication systems. We begin by showing the existence of a maximum number of iterations, beyond which, no significant improvement is obtained. We establish a criterion for the number of maximum effective iterations. We propose a modified algorithm that uses the measured SNR to dynamically set the number of iterations to achieve

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Comparative Computational Strength of Quantum Oracles

Alp Atici · 2003 · arXiv

It is an established fact that for many of the interesting problems quantum algorithms based on queries of the standard oracle bring no significant improvement in comparison to known classical algorithms. It is conceivable that there are other oracles of algorithmic importance acting in a less intuitive fashion to which such limitations do not apply. Thus motivated this article suggests a broader understanding towards what a general quantum oracle is. We propose a general definition of a quantum oracle and give a classification of quantum oracles based on the behavior of the eigenvalues and ei

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Can automated smoothing significantly improve benchmark time series classification algorithms?

James Large, Paul Southam, Anthony Bagnall · 2018 · arXiv

tl;dr: no, it cannot, at least not on average on the standard archive problems. We assess whether using six smoothing algorithms (moving average, exponential smoothing, Gaussian filter, Savitzky-Golay filter, Fourier approximation and a recursive median sieve) could be automatically applied to time series classification problems as a preprocessing step to improve the performance of three benchmark classifiers (1-Nearest Neighbour with Euclidean and Dynamic Time Warping distances, and Rotation Forest). We found no significant improvement over unsmoothed data even when we set the smoothing param