The Null Institute / Publications
All Research
Independent reports, verification pilots, methodological notes and commentary. Publications are grouped by format, not by a claim of peer-review or certainty. Original sources, methods, limitations, and supporting materials are linked within each record where available.
20 records
How Often Does One Blood Pressure Reading Change the Category? NHANES 2021–2023
In a survey-weighted NHANES 2021–2023 reanalysis, 16.4% of adults changed US blood-pressure category between the first reading and the average of three. These are within-visit category changes, not diagnostic errors.
Completed Does Not Mean Verified: An Audit of an Autonomous AI Research Lab
A retrospective audit of an autonomous AI research lab found completed workflows with unresolved answers, reproducible calculations, and an uncertainty heuristic given more statistical authority than it deserved. Based on recovered PostgreSQL records and computational artifacts.
What Does the Beverage Hydration Index Actually Measure?
The Beverage Hydration Index is reproducible. But does less urine after a drink really mean better hydration? A construct-validity, outcome, and claim-drift audit.
Continuous White and Pink Noise for Sleep: What Survives Controlled Testing?
A falsification-oriented evidence synthesis separating environmental-noise masking from the stronger claim that continuous white or pink noise directly improves sleep.
Does Killing Oral Bacteria Actually Make the Mouth Healthier?
Chlorhexidine kills oral bacteria and reduces plaque. But does suppressing the microbiome actually improve health? A falsification-oriented evidence review.
Repeatability Is Not Transportability: What Makes a Standardized Glucose Challenge Informative?
A harmonized reanalysis of CGMacros and Stanford/Hall suggests that a standardized glucose challenge can be repeatable without being useful for cross-meal personalization. Food & You further weakens the idea that larger glucose excursions are automatically more informative.
How Verifiable Are Frontier AI Safety Claims? A Public-Evidence Pilot
A small, reproducible audit of ten public GPT-5.6 safety claims, separating independent confirmation, partial corroboration and developer-only evidence.
How Much of Migrant Life-Satisfaction Convergence Is Measurement?
An ESS1–11 replication of migrant destination convergence followed by a direct response-style falsification test. Migrants adopt some destination scale-use habits, but those changes do not account for the full life-satisfaction convergence signal.
A Strong Short-Term Mortality Association That Attenuated in a Later Mortality Linkage
Replication of a reported NHANES underhydration–mortality association followed by a prespecified reanalysis using the 2019 mortality linkage. The original short-follow-up association was reproducible, but its magnitude attenuated from about HR 2.3 to HR 1.095 in the later mortality vintage.
Two-Day Stability of Low Total-Moisture Intake in NHANES 2011–2012
Exploratory reanalysis of NHANES 2011–2012 showing that repeated low total-moisture intake is moderately stable and is associated with more concentrated spot urine, while a one-day low-intake label contains substantial day-to-day noise.