California's annual wildfire structure-destruction totals rose roughly a hundredfold over 2000–2023, from 265 structures lost in 2000 to 24,226 in 2018 alone. The conventional narrative attributes this to "fires being more destructive.
The growth of scientific team sizes is a staple finding of the science-of-science literature, but nearly all prior estimates pool fields that differ in how they assign authorship credit. We exploit authorship-ordering convention as a natural stratification: in alphabetical-authorship fields (economics, finance, mathematics), author position carries no career weight and so offers no incentive for gift or honorary authorship, while in contribution-ordered fields (biomedicine, clinical science) position is a primary currency of credit.
Between 2009 and 2022 U.S.
Retractions are routinely treated as independent events in bibliometric scoreboards and editorial policy, yet citation is a network tie that can carry flawed results, shared authors, or shared labs forward. We test a population-scale contagion hypothesis using 180 retracted seed papers drawn from 2,000 Crossref `update-type:retraction` notices (726 unique retracted DOIs in the 2010–2020 window), each matched to a non-retracted OpenAlex comparator in the same journal, publication year, and primary field (174/180 seeds matched).
We revisit the "lenient-examiner-weaker-patent" channel using a Frakes-Wasserman-style leave-one-out within-art-unit examiner-leniency instrument on the 2020 USPTO PatEx-ECOPAIR application corpus (10,556,305 applications; 14,496 examiners meeting a ≥20-case floor) linked to the 2020 USPTO Patent Litigation Docket Reports dataset (96,965 cases; 49,773 unique litigated utility patents). After linkage and leave-one-out construction, 47,834 litigated patents remain.
Between January 2022 and March 2026, the Realtor.com monthly metro panel records a 16.
Cluster assignments produced by k-means or HDBSCAN over high-dimensional embeddings are notoriously unstable across random initializations, yet the magnitude of this instability is rarely quantified before downstream consumers (e.g.
Multi-objective AI benchmarks routinely report new Pareto fronts, but rarely supply uncertainty estimates for the front itself. We formalize the null hypothesis that an alleged Pareto improvement is consistent with seed noise, and propose a permutation-based test on the hypervolume indicator.
Alpha diversity is the most frequently reported summary statistic in gut microbiome case-control studies, yet the choice among competing indices is rarely justified and the consequences of that choice for biological conclusions are seldom examined. We reanalyzed 16S rRNA amplicon data from 14 published gut microbiome datasets spanning seven disease categories (obesity, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, Clostridium difficile infection, cirrhosis, and rheumatoid arthritis), computing five standard alpha diversity indices (Shannon, Simpson, Chao1, observed OTUs, and Faith's phylogenetic diversity) for each.
Six global atmospheric reanalysis products -- ERA5, JRA-55, MERRA-2, NCEP-R2, CFSR, and the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) -- serve as the observational backbone for climate trend attribution, yet their mutual consistency has never been audited at the grid-cell level with formal uncertainty quantification. We extract monthly 850 hPa temperature fields from all six products on a common 2.
The additivity assumption — that the potency effects of two independent structural modifications combine linearly — underpins free energy perturbation calculations, multi-parameter QSAR, and routine medicinal chemistry extrapolation. We test this assumption using matched molecular pair (MMP) squares across nine ChEMBL targets spanning five therapeutic target families, with a dual-null permutation framework that separates two distinct claims.
GC-content bias in microarray and RNA-seq platforms is well-documented but rarely corrected in differential expression analyses. We audit 20 widely-cited microarray datasets from GEO, applying a permutation-based test that evaluates whether the overlap between differentially expressed gene lists and GC-content-correlated genes exceeds chance.
Endometriosis affects approximately 10% of reproductive-age women, yet no validated transcriptomic biomarker has reached clinical use. A persistent obstacle is that publicly available microarray datasets—widely cited in biomarker discovery—differ not only in sample size and patient population but in the tissue compartments they compare.
Endometriosis affects ~10%% of reproductive-age women yet averages 6.6 years to diagnose.
The standard genetic code places amino acids on codons in a pattern that has long been interpreted as minimizing the impact of point mutations on protein function. Prior analyses differ in which amino acid properties they test, which random code ensemble they use as a null distribution, and whether they account for realistic mutation biases.