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Warehouse are meant as such -- places where artifacts are, first and foremost, contained. Having said that, I wonder why there is no research into possible combinations of artifacts and their inner workings in general. In the series we see Claudia tinker with (and sometimes improve on) some single artifacts, but I'd call that sporadic.

Also, in seasons

4 & 5 Paracelsus, after being de-bronzed, proceeds to create and alternate timeline wherein he turns the Warehouse into a research facility, and he did study artifacts and their interaction. Granted, the whole setup was quite totalitarian and the guy was arguably a sociopath, yet

the whole topic of research is never, as far as I can recall, visited again.

Is there an in-universe explanation for that?

To forestall a point in possible answers: I realise that the more powerful artifacts tend to have (sometimes quite significant) downsides. What I meant by research included figuring out ways to neutralise and counteract those (possibly with other artifacts, which we see the characters do several times throughout the series).

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    Because literally every time an artifact is looked at, breathed on, touched, mentioned in passing or thought about, it results in a runaway catastrophe that needs multiple trained agents to spend an entire episode fixing.
    – Valorum
    Oct 7, 2018 at 8:30
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    I would argue that's for lack of research. For an analogy, if people had to rely on professionals every time something went up in flames, I'd argue that would give them a reason to research fire :-)
    – Chiffa
    Oct 7, 2018 at 8:32
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    @Valorum But it was really annoying to see them dump new stuff in the Warehouse all the time without thinking, while it was obvious that the different artifacts in there also interacted with each other, and they didn't really seem to care about that.
    – Mr Lister
    Oct 7, 2018 at 12:32

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First, it has been a while since I last watched Warehouse, so I may not have some of my references correct.

As you mentioned, they did use artefacts in their normal activities of tag and bag. Just look at Artie's bag of artifacts that he took everywhere. (My favorite is still the original studio recording of Oye Como Va to break Pete out of a trance).

We also see the characters using a special room to determine the most appropriate place to store artifacts in the warehouse so that they don't have negative interactions with other objects. (S4, E12 where Artie tries to work the Feng Shui Spiral)

As for Claudia, for every time that she tinkered with something like a Farnsworth, there is also the time that she became magnetized and stuck to the ceiling of the warehouse (S1, E9).

Plus, there was knowledge about each and every artifact. If you look closely at the cards attached to the artifacts it clearly had the name of the artifact, its properties or what it allowed the user to do, and it also had the warnings as to what the consequences of using the artifact did.

So, yes, outside of the Paracelsus arc they did not have a Lab for the research of artifacts, but that does not mean that they didn't know how they worked.

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