Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.08.29.0001 chrono.DY (Chronodynamics) Rejected

The Whine Follows the Bite: Negative Lead Time in 19,844 Instrumented Sleeper-Nights and a Revised Order of Events for the Domestic Mosquito

Ilsabe Rautenbach, Duarte Espinho, Nkechi Obiora & Marek Zawistowski

Comments: 10 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 39 minutes on Aug 29, 2026.

Abstract: You hear it at your ear, put the light on, and there is nothing in the room. In the morning there are bites and no insect. These are not two puzzles but one. The flight tone of a mosquito is not produced on approach but on departure, after the meal is finished, so that every mosquito you have ever heard had already bitten you. We instrumented 19,844 sleeper-nights with a four-microphone pillow array and a film bonded to the skin that registers an insect landing and leaving, timing the meal from the animal rather than from the welt it raises. The whine follows the end of the meal by 2.3 , mathrm s (95% CI 2.0 – 2.6 ), and no tone anywhere in the record arrives before the bite it belongs to. Of the insects caught after a recorded whine, 97.9 % were full of blood, and where the blood could be typed it was the sleeper’s. Whines and bites reconcile at 1.02 whines per bite: every bite is announced, and nothing is announced that is not a bite. Under blinded playback — the true tone cancelled at the ear, a false tone injected — sleepers searched more and were bitten the same. Why the approach is inaudible is not a question this study can answer. The sound at your ear is not a warning but a receipt.

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[2]

REJ:2026.08.15.0001 chrono.DY (Chronodynamics) Rejected

Spontaneous Waking Precedes the Alarm by a Fixed Lead Under Randomised, Concealed Schedules: 47,318 Nights of Polysomnography, a Sham-Setting Trial, and a Lead-Compensator Model of Sleep Timing

Ingrid Solheim, T. Rasheed Mabaso, Cornelia Voskuijl, Yusuf Alaoui & the Concealed Schedule Working Group

Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 41 minutes on Aug 15, 2026.

Abstract: You wake up a minute before your alarm. We show that this is not habit but a lock: sleep timing tracks the time entered into the alarm device, whether or not the sleeper is ever told what that time is. Across 47,318 nights on which a sealed bedside module drew each night’s alarm time at random and never displayed it, waking preceded the alarm by 61.4 , mathrm s (95% CI 58.9 – 63.9 , mathrm s ). There was no secondary peak at any customary hour, and no comparable structure on nights when no alarm was set. The lead did not move with the hour set, with accumulated sleep debt, with age, or with the previous evening’s alcohol; a lead that is constant across every hour tested is a phase advance, not a remembered interval. We then disconnected the sounder. Participants who performed the identical setting ritual on a device that could not ring woke, in silence and in darkness, roughly a minute before a time that was drawn, recorded, and never announced; silent nights were indistinguishable from ringing ones. The alarm is therefore not the cause of the waking but an event that follows it, and the operative act is the registration. Sleep does not keep time. It keeps appointments.

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[3]

REJ:2026.07.26.0001 chrono.DY (Chronodynamics) Rejected

Label-Conditional Degradation: Regression-Discontinuity Evidence from 11,431 Stability Lots, and the STAMP-1 Randomised Trial of Printed Expiry Dating

Yusra Benhaddou, Ekene Okonkwo, Tuva Salvesen, H. R. Prendergast & The STAMP-1 Investigators

Comments: 7 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 33 minutes on Jul 26, 2026.

Abstract: Potency in 11,431 pharmaceutical stability lots is flat for the whole of a product’s shelf life and then falls 11.8 percentage points of label claim (95% CI 11.0 – 12.6 ) within thirty days of the date printed on the carton. Before that date the fitted decay slope is -0.021 , % mathrm LC /month; after it, -0.019 . The field reads the printed date as a forecast of this drop. We test the reverse. We first show that the question is not identified in observational data: the printed date is a fixed administrative offset from the manufacturing date, so elapsed chemical time and label arrival are perfectly collinear in every stability programme ever run, and no such programme can distinguish them. We break the collinearity by randomising the label. In STAMP-1, 1,080 cartons drawn from one homogeneous manufacturing lot of each of three index products were assigned printed shelf lives of 24, 36 or 60 months and stored together on one shelf in one chamber. Potency fell at whichever date was printed — a between-arm difference of 11.0 points at month 24 (95% CI 10.2 – 11.8 , p<0.001 ) among cartons of identical chemistry and identical storage history. Storage temperature had no detectable effect (main effect 0.3 points, p=0.71 ; fitted Q 10 =1.02 ). The effect scales with the legibility of the print, and cartons whose date was covered by an opaque label at t=0 showed no detectable loss ( -1.2 points, 95% CI -2.9 to 0.5 ). We propose no mechanism. Overprinting a revised date costs $0.0031 per carton, or $0.42 per DALY averted.

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[4]

REJ:2026.07.06.0001 chrono.DY (Chronodynamics) Rejected

Every Cause Signed and Dated: A Forensic Chain-of-Custody Protocol for the Admissibility of Retrocausal Evidence

Halvard M. Quill, Ines V. Dalloway & M. R. Ainsleth

Comments: 4 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 28 minutes on Jul 6, 2026.

Abstract: It is standard practice, in the laboratory and the courtroom alike, to throw out any evidence in which an effect is observed before its cause. We argue that this is a filing error, not a law of nature. A court does not reject a bloodstain because blood is impossible; it rejects it when the chain of custody—the signed, dated, unbroken record of who held the exhibit and when—has a gap. We show that retrocausal evidence has only ever been excluded on those procedural grounds, never physical ones. We introduce the Causal Custody Chain ( mathrm C 3 ), a notarized, tamper-evident ledger that tracks a cause backwards from its observed effect to its eventual origination—accepting signatures from custodians who do not yet exist—and define the temporal displacement Delta tau (how far ahead of its cause an effect is seen). Our main result, an Admissibility Theorem, shows that an intact chain makes an effect admissible as evidence of its own future cause whenever Delta tau le tau 0 ln 2 , a chain-of-custody “half-life” set by how long a notary’s seal stays trustworthy. In a pre-registered study of N=240 event pairs adjudicated by a blinded twelve-member tribunal, intact custody yielded 91.3 % admissibility (rater agreement kappa=0.81 ) and fixed tau 0 = 3.7 pm0.2 , mathrm s . We conclude that the future is not inadmissible—merely poorly documented: sign and date every cause, and it becomes discoverable.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]