Blasting is still an economical and viable method for rock excavation in mining and civil works projects. Ground vibration generated due to blasting is an undesirable phenomenon which is harmful for the nearby inhabitants and dwellings and should be prevented. In this study, an attempt has been made to predict the blast-induced ground vibration and frequency by incorporating rock properties, blast design and explosive parameters using the general regression neural network (GRNN) technique. To validate this methodology, the predictions obtained were compared with those obtained using the artificial neural network (ANN) model as well as by multivariate regression analysis (MVRA). Among all the methods, GRNN provides excellent predictions with a high degree of correlation.
Emphasis mine: they're testing if they can predict how the ground will shake after an explosion.
They're not going to spend five years dreaming up a model for it completely on a dry-erase board, set off a stick of dynamite, realize they were wrong, and throw out five years of work. They get preliminary results that are positive and encourage the project to go forward. They make up a model based on data, then refine it with subsequent bombs. If one were completely unable to use the method they propose to figure out how the ground shakes during explosions, they'd likely find that out before months had gone by.
I don't know what the breakdown is between clinical trials and basic research. I'd bet there's more research money spent on clinical trials than basic research (necessary, given certain realities about clinical trials) but that there are more scientists in basic research. So I'd bet that most research out there is actually not really affected a whole lot by the negative results issue: if you get a negative result, you get it before you commit yourself to it, and you move your reserarch in a different direction.
You'd at least capitalize it as "Vrije Universiteit", because it's a proper noun* and those are capitalized (in either English or Dutch).
*Not just a free university, but the Free University.
And Liberty University is already taken.
Liberty University is called that instead of "Free University" because it is neither free-as-in-beer nor free-as-in-speech. It teaches the religion of Capitalism and the legal principles of the Bible.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn