Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.09.09.0001 astro.GA (Astrogastronomy) Rejected

There Is Nothing to Eat: Olbers’ Paradox in the Domestic Pantry, a Depth–Recession Law from 9,306 Cupboard-Months, and a Horizon at Twenty-One Centimetres

Marguerite Skene & Tobias Ng

Comments: 10 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 9 minutes on Sep 9, 2026.

Abstract: A full cupboard routinely contains nothing to eat. This is not a failure of appetite or of imagination: the food is receding, and most of it has already gone too far to be reached. A packed shelf is optically thick, and a standard base cabinet gives an unobstructed sight-line to its back wall in fewer than two openings in a hundred; yet households remove nothing, and report that there is nothing to eat, in 0.61 of openings (95% CI 0.59 – 0.63 ). We treat the report as a measurement, not a fault in the reporter, and find the fault in the shelf. From an instrumented cohort we recover a depth–velocity law: an item recedes from the aperture at a rate proportional to its depth. Two consequences follow. A horizon stands at 21 cm, well inside an ordinary cabinet: beyond it nothing can be recovered, because it withdraws faster than a hand can return it; and the labels of items approaching it shift out of the band in which writing can be read, an effect separated from simple darkness by matching illuminance at depth. Consistent with Harrison’s correction to Olbers, the finite-age term dominates the redshift term. In a three-arm randomised trial, transporting shelving all but abolished null returns, while an identical sham drawer front did nothing at all. Everything you have ever lost at the back of a cupboard is still there, and still leaving.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[2]

REJ:2026.08.24.0001 astro.GA (Astrogastronomy) Rejected

Lunar Tidal Forcing of Overnight Sourdough Fermentation

S. Halvard Nyberg & Miriam O. Aftel

Comments: 5 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 21 minutes on Aug 24, 2026.

Abstract: Every baker keeps a small superstition about the moon. Loaves proofed overnight during a full moon are said to come up taller, and the folklore is old, cross-cultural, and — as we show here — correct. Fermenting sourdough is a colloid of water in a viscoelastic gluten cage; the Moon’s tidal potential, acting on a body that is 43% water by mass and mechanically compliant on the relevant time scale, exerts a periodic vertical strain that biases yeast gas expansion vertically. The resulting rise anisotropy accumulates over an overnight proof. We report a preregistered, latitude-controlled trial of 6{,}412 loaves proofed simultaneously at 41 collaborating bakeries between 2014 and 2025. Peak crumb height at the moment of oven-loading tracks the sub-lunar zenith angle integrated over the proof, with a coefficient of eta mathrm L = 1.83 pm 0.24 , mathrm mm , mathrm deg -1 (95% CI), rising a median 11.7 mm at full moon relative to new moon. The effect survives correction for atmospheric pressure, ambient temperature, and yeast lineage, and vanishes on preregistered dead-yeast controls. A field-tested lunar-phase feed-forward correction reduces the reject rate at a large sourdough co-op by 44% (2019–2024). We do not know why the Moon does not lift the flour.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[3]

REJ:2026.07.25.0001 astro.GA (Astrogastronomy) Rejected

On the Flat Dilution Curves of Cooked Dishes: Evidence for a Non-Luminous Flavour Component and a Structural Protocol for Its Recovery

Eluned Prosser & Toma Ferreira

Comments: 11 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 23 minutes on Jul 25, 2026.

Abstract: Perceived flavour intensity should fall as a dish is diluted. Across 41 cooked dishes carried through a nine-point geometric dilution series spanning a 43-fold range in concentration, it does not: the fitted Stevens exponent is beta = 0.06 (95% CI [-0.01, ,0.13] ) against a literature value of 0.85 . Five single-ingredient controls run in the same series fall off correctly ( beta = 0.81 ), so neither the panel nor the design accounts for the result. We therefore compare two methodologically independent measurements of the flavour held in a pot — luminous flavour L , obtained by descriptive panel, and dynamical flavour M mathrm dyn , obtained from the dispersion of headspace release rates under a virial closure and never tasted — and find them discrepant by a median factor Upsilon star = M mathrm dyn /L = 118 , with a spread of 40 to 913 that we do not attempt to narrow. We read the excess as a non-luminous flavour component: present in the dish, dynamically detectable, and unperceived. Modelling the pot as a weighted digraph of competitive channel occlusion, we show that the perceived flavour vector is the leading eigenvector of the occlusion operator, that the measured spectral gap ( lambda 1/ lambda 2 = 6.8 ) collapses that vector onto one or two compounds within minutes of the first simmer, and that the dark component is exactly the orthogonal complement — the spectral shadow. The mechanism is structural rather than compositional, and it is reversible. Under a staged-participation schedule that alters only the order in which ingredients are granted thermal contact, with composition, mass, energy input and elapsed time held fixed, L rises 9.4-fold and Upsilon star falls to 12.6. Holding that schedule fixed and replacing all twelve ingredients with twelve sharing no item moves L by 0.19 perceptual units, below the panel’s 0.5 -unit discrimination threshold ( F(1,29) = 0.14 , p = 0.71 ). Schedule moves perceived flavour 269 times further than composition does. We conclude that 99.15 % of the flavour so far prepared has not been tasted, and that the ingredient list is, on this evidence, an inventory rather than a cause.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]