If results were thrown out because of a confounding factor then it would hopefully be mentioned in the paper. I've had a similar thought about these little ins

If results were thrown out because of a confounding factor then it would hopefully be mentioned in the paper. I've had a similar thought about these little insights. There are literally thousands of times more biology undergrads than there are people doing biology research. Biological experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. There are so many confounding variables, data is hard to collect, etc, that experiments bomb as often as they succeed. A lot of these experiments are extremely well supported, so you might actually be able to discover something novel if you were able to track the failures. Anyways, I don't do anything with biology anymore, but I strongly believe that biology is a field where citizen scientists could make a meaningful impact.