Every instalment of The Null Result, in order of publication.
This series exists because a newspaper that only confirms what its readers already believe is not a newspaper. Each instalment is a claim we took seriously, investigated at length, and could not stand up. We run them on the front page.
A statutory register of secondments has been published quarterly since 1994. We read all 129 issues, rebuilt the count from primary appointment records twice, and traced the famous figure to one graduate student's spreadsheet from 2009, which counted one governor's father.
Twenty-seven astronomical targets, back-calculated for 200 BCE to 650 CE, tested against azimuths from a drone survey. The tolerance and the correction were published first. Nothing survives. Slope at the origin predicts bearing better than any star.
The switch theory says the wreck is the Olympic, sunk for insurance. It makes one hard prediction: the yard number on the propeller. We put a camera on the seabed for eleven hours to read it.
Our antiquities correspondent went looking for four tablets she had listed as unverified for three years. She found all four — and found that the sentence which moved everybody is a standard closing, attested 211 times in a 1998 book.
Two reporters walked 1,340 kilometres of border in February, read the 1947 triangulation registers, reconciled fourteen years of ferry records, and interviewed 416 people. The tests were published before we started. One thread would not close and it is printed.
The claim that avian populations were replaced with surveillance devices makes a testable prediction about anatomy. This newspaper tested it, with a veterinary pathologist, on road-killed specimens from eleven states.
