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Role of Najran University Scholarship Students in the United Kingdom in cultural bridging and civilizational dialog

This study explores the role of Najran University scholarship students in the United Kingdom in promoting cultural bridging and civilizational dialog. To achieve this objective, a structured questionnaire was designed and administered. The instrument demonstrated high validity and reliability, with a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.879. The study sample consisted of 59 Saudi scholarship students from Najran University currently studying in the United Kingdom. The questionnaire was distributed during the second semester of the 2024–2025 academic year. Taking into consideration the reported limitations of the study, the analysis revealed that Najran University scholarship students in the United Kingdom actively contribute to cultural bridging and civilizational dialog within academic institutions in their host country. Their engagement extends beyond the university setting, encompassing residential life and community interactions, where they help promote Saudi cultural and civilizational values. Furthermore, they play a vital role in fostering cross-cultural relationships with international peers. Statistical analysis revealed no significant differences and very weak effect sizes in terms of gender, age, marital status, academic level, or field of study. Additionally, the study identified key mechanisms and strategies utilized by Najran University scholarship students to introduce and represent Saudi culture and to foster constructive civilizational engagement within the multicultural context of the United Kingdom.

Effects of tibialis anterior contraction on the medial longitudinal arch and hallux valgus angle: A functional anatomical perspective

This study aimed to elucidate the effects of the tibialis anterior (TA) muscle contraction on the medial longitudinal arch (MLA) and hallux valgus (HV) angle, primarily focusing on the potential functional role of the TA in foot alignment. Twenty-five healthy adults (mean age: 20.7 ± 1.0 years) participated. Electrical stimulation was applied to the TA without ankle dorsiflexion. A triaxial accelerometer was attached to the skin over the navicular bone, and electrogoniometers were placed over the interphalangeal joints of the hallux and ankle. The navicular displacement was calculated through double integration of the acceleration data. Contraction of the TA caused navicular displacement in the supination direction (upward, posterior, and medial), suggesting a temporary elevation of the MLA. The hallux showed an average varus shift of 1.36°; the shift was observed in 24 of 25 participants (p < 0.001). A significant positive correlation was found between upward displacement of the navicular bone and the extent of varus change in the HV angle (r = 0.463, p = 0.020). Additionally, a greater initial HV angle was associated with a larger varus shift in the hallux after TA contraction (r = 0.433, p = 0.030). No significant correlations were observed between the HV angle change and ankle dorsiflexion, suggesting that the medial hallux shift may result from structural changes in the MLA rather than isolated joint motion. These findings provide novel evidence that TA contractions can elevate the MLA and induce varus displacement of the hallux. These findings further suggest that the TA contributes to foot biomechanics not only as an isolated muscle but also as part of a coordinated muscle system involved in arch dynamics and toe alignment. This suggests the potential clinical applications of TA activation in noninvasive interventions for mild-to-moderate HV, such as exercise therapy or neuromuscular electrical stimulation.

Antioxidant, antibacterial, in vitro, and in silico α-glucosidase inhibition activities and chemical profiling of Usnea cornuta Korb

The total phenolic content and flavonoid content of the Usnea cornuta extract were evaluated as 210.31 ± 2.87 mg GAE/g and 22.42 ± 0.78 mg QE/g, respectively. The crude extract exhibited strong antioxidant activity (IC 50 : 32.91 ± 1.27 µg/mL) and notable anti-diabetic effects via α-glucosidase inhibition, with IC 50 values of 2.59 ± 2.23 µg/mL for the dichloromethane extract. LC-MS analysis identified eleven metabolites like D-mannitol (1), galbinic acid (2), conhypoprotocetraric acid (3), roccellaric acid (4), diffractatic acid (5), haemathamnolic acid isomer (6), conprotocetraric acid (7), constictic acid I (8), salazinic acid II (9), menegazziaic acid (10), and one unknown compound (11). Among these, menegazziaic acid exhibited the strongest binding affinity of −9.7 kcal/mol with the target (PDB ID 3A4A), favorable molecular dynamics, binding free energy (MM/GBSA, and pharmacokinetic profiles. Furthermore, the extract showed strong antimicrobial activity, with inhibition zones of 23 mm and 26 mm at 10 mg/mL against Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 29213 and ATCC 245, respectively. These findings highlight the therapeutic potential of Usnea cornuta , specifically for managing oxidative stress, microbial infections, and type 2 diabetes.

Conceptual thermal constraints on the growth of the first tree on a terraformed Mars

The environmental conditions on present‑day Mars are far outside the range tolerated by known complex terrestrial life. Conceptual climate studies have suggested that, in hypothetical terraforming scenarios, artificially enhancing the greenhouse effect could restore Mars to more habitable surface conditions. Early colonizing terrestrial life on a warming Mars would plausibly consist of lichens and high‑alpine or high‑arctic plants. Here, we consider a later, more demanding step and investigate the thermal conditions under which the first tree could, in principle, grow on the Martian surface. Based on empirical treeline studies, we adopt thermal thresholds for a representative high‑elevation conifer: a growing season of at least 110 sols during which daily minimum temperatures exceed −6 °C, daily means exceed 6 °C, and daily maxima remain below 40 °C. In addition to liquid water and suitable substrates, O₂ at ~1 hPa and non‑toxic CO₂ levels are likely required; however, these non‑thermal constraints are not explicitly modelled and make the temperature thresholds necessary but not sufficient for tree viability. We use a high‑resolution surface energy balance model of Mars, assuming a pure CO₂ atmosphere with prescribed grey infrared opacity and neglecting the coupled water cycle, full atmospheric dynamics, photochemistry, and surface radiation, to estimate spatio‑temporal thermal windows for potential tree growth as a function of CO₂ surface pressure and additional greenhouse forcing. For a 100 hPa CO₂ atmosphere, near‑surface temperatures satisfying the treeline thresholds first appear when the added grey infrared opacity is ~ 0.39 optical depths. In our simulations, these thermal criteria are initially met not in the tropics (±25°), but in the low‑lying Hellas Basin. As either the CO₂ surface pressure or the imposed grey opacity is increased beyond the values required to open the thermal window, large regions of the southern hemisphere subsequently become thermally overheated and thus unsuitable for tree growth. In this sense, the thermal windows identified in our simulations mark conditions under which temperature would no longer be the primary limiting factor for tree growth, assuming that other essential environmental constraints (such as water availability, radiation environment, substrate properties, and atmospheric composition) are satisfied. We emphasize that this study deals with temperature only, which is an important factor in tree growth on Mars. Other factors that affect tree growth, including water, CO₂ limits, O 2 limit, UV and ionizing radiation, and soil nutrients and microbial population, are not considered explicitly here.

The mTOR/Akt pathway is involved in regulating astrocyte growth and GLT-1 expression during cerebral ischemia-reperfusion

Stroke is one of the most prevalent causes of death and disability worldwide and places a heavy economic burden on families and society. High glutamate accumulation and subsequent excitotoxicity after ischemia and hypoxia are important pathogenetic mechanisms of brain injury after ischemic stroke. Glutamate transporter 1 (GLT-1) on astrocyte membranes is responsible for 90% of glutamate clearance. The involvement of the mTOR/Akt pathway in the upregulation of GLT-1 expression in astrocytes under oxygen-glucose deprivation and reoxygenation conditions has been demonstrated. Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether there is a negative feedback pathway from mTOR to Akt during cerebral ischemia/reperfusion (I/R). It has also not been elucidated whether the mTOR/Akt pathway is involved in the expression of astrocyte GLT-1 in cerebral I/R injury. In this study, we established a middle cerebral artery occlusion-reperfusion rat model to investigate the interactions and mechanisms of the mTOR/Akt cascade with GLT-1 under cerebral I/R conditions. These results provide evidence that brain I/R injury activates the mTOR/Akt pathway in the ischemic penumbra, increases astrocyte activation, and downregulates the expression of GLT-1. Inhibition of the mTOR pathway reversed GLT-1 downregulation and inhibited astrocyte activation by blocking the mTOR pathway, thereby attenuating neurological dysfunction, inflammatory response, and apoptosis caused by brain I/R injury. In contrast, inhibiting the Akt pathway did not provide neuroprotection, with no significant decrease in the number of astrocytes, inflammatory response, or apoptosis in the model group. Additionally, the inhibition downregulated GLT-1 expression and promoted the lengthening and thickening of astrocyte processes in cerebral ischemic rats. Thus, the mTOR/Akt cascade may be involved in regulating astrocyte growth and GLT-1 expression during brain I/R injury. Furthermore, inhibiting the mTOR pathway may mitigate apoptosis and the release of inflammatory factors, thereby fostering neuronal survival and safeguarding the central nervous system.

Multicomponent Stapling of Glucagon‐Like Peptide‐1 Enables Receptor‐Guided PROTAC Delivery

ABSTRACT Achieving cell‐selective targeted protein degradation remains a major challenge for translating proteolysis‐targeting chimeras (PROTACs) into therapeutics. Although pancreatic β‐cells are well vascularised and readily accessible to circulating peptides, selective receptor‐mediated drug delivery remains challenging. Here, we exploit the glucagon‐like peptide‐1 receptor (GLP‐1R) as a β‐cell‐specific entry route and report, for the first time, a multicomponent stapled glucagon‐like peptide‐1 (GLP‐1) analogue constructed by tryptophan‐mediated multicomponent Petasis reaction (TMPR). This modular stapling strategy affords a conformationally stabilised GLP‐1 peptide bearing a chemically orthogonal handle for late‐stage conjugation, displaying markedly enhanced α‐helicity and improved receptor potency, compared with the wild‐type peptide. Linking this improved analogue to a bromodomain‐containing protein 4 (BRD4)‐directed degrader furnishes the first GLP‐1‐guided PROTAC, which retains GLP‐1R agonism and induces selective BRD4 degradation in GLP‐1R‐positive cells, consistent with receptor‐guided uptake and intracellular activation of the degrader payload. Together, these results provide strong proof‐of‐concept evidence that a TMPR‐stapled GLP‐1 peptide can serve as a β‐cell‐directed delivery platform for receptor‐defined protein degradation.

A multi-criteria evaluation of marine pollution systems based on expert-driven analysis and robust ranking methods

Evaluation of a novel C2 pedicle screw insertion technique: a retrospective comparative clinical study and finite element analysis

An innovative technology boosts image quality for protein structures

An exploratory multimodal pipeline for recurrence prediction in CRC with XELOX therapy

Aflibercept biosimilar use and real-world outcomes in various retinal diseases: the AURA Korea study

Briefing Chat: The epic journey of Stonehenge’s central stone

Association of the C-reactive protein-triglyceride glucose index with new-onset myocardial infarction risk: a prospective cohort study

Transformer-based coreference resolution modeling for Amharic text

Abstract Coreference resolution is the task of identifying all textual expressions that refer to the same real-world entity within a document. Coreference resolution is essential for several NLP applications, including machine translation, question answering, information extraction, summarization, and dialogue systems. While substantial progress has been made in high-resource languages such as English and Arabic. Amharic is a morphologically rich, low-resource language remains underexplored due to the scarcity of annotated datasets and specialized language tools. This study proposes a transformer-based approach for Amharic coreference resolution using multilingual BERT (mBERT ) . The proposed system combines contextual embeddings extracted from mBERT with manually engineered mention-pair features, such as sentence-level distance and exact string matching, through a supervised mention-pair classification framework. The system is composed of two main phases: training and testing. The training phase includes preprocessing, tokenization, sentence segmentation, feature extraction, and model training. The testing phase involves similar preprocessing steps and the prediction of coreference clusters. We created a novel annotated Amharic corpus consisting of 312 documents, 5428 sentences, 18,763 mentions, and 4912 coreference clusters to train and evaluate the model. Standard coreference evaluation metrics, including MUC, B 3 , CEAF-m, CEAF-e, and BLANC, were employed. The results show that the proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art Amharic systems, achieving F1-scores of 80%, 85.71%, 90.9%, 88.86%, and 81.7% across the respective metrics. This study demonstrates that transformer-based contextual embeddings can effectively capture the semantic relationships necessary for Amharic coreference resolution.

Daily briefing: How Venus flytraps snap shut

Anti-CD4 monoclonal antibody treatment enhances CD8+ T cell antitumor immunity and suppresses tumor growth in pulmonary fibrosis-associated lung cancer in mice

PERMA-Profiler as a multidimensional measure of well-being in a French context

Abstract Subjective well-being is a central component of physical and mental health and is increasingly recognized as a key indicator of quality of life. Despite the widespread use of the PERMA framework, no validated French version of the PERMA-Profiler is currently available. The aim of this study was to translate and culturally adapt the PERMA-Profiler into French and to examine its psychometric properties in a large sample of adults. A total of 612 French-speaking adults completed the French version of the PERMA-Profiler as well as measures of flourishing, anxiety and depression. The sample was randomly divided into two independent subsamples to conduct exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The EFA suggested a parsimonious three-factor solution, while comparative model tests confirmed the theoretical five-factor structure of the PERMA model. The CFA conducted on an independent subsample strongly confirmed a correlated five-factor model, as well as a second-order hierarchical model reflecting a general well-being factor. The PERMA-Profiler demonstrated good to excellent internal consistency for most dimensions and for the total score, although the “engagement” dimension showed lower reliability, which is consistent with previous validation studies. Test–retest analyses indicated good temporal stability for the total score and most subscales. Convergent validity was confirmed by strong positive associations with flourishing and perceived happiness. Discriminant validity was evidenced by weaker associations with anxiety, depression, loneliness and negative emotions than with flourishing, although some correlations with HADS anxiety and depression scores reached moderate to strong magnitude. Overall, the French version of the PERMA-Profiler has robust psychometric properties and supports the multidimensional structure of psychological well-being proposed by the PERMA framework. This instrument is a reliable and theoretically grounded tool for assessing the well-being of French-speaking adult population, while highlighting the distinct psychometric behavior of the Engagement dimension.

Bioinformatic pipeline to identify potential therapeutic targets with subsequent isolation and characterization of novel human anti- DDR1 antibodies

Leveraging reinforcement learning for an efficient windows registry analysis during cyber incident response

Abstract Microsoft Windows remains the dominant desktop operating system and therefore a frequent focus of digital forensic and incident response investigations. Windows Registry analysis is particularly valuable because it captures persistence mechanisms, execution traces, user activity, device usage, and system configuration changes that are often central to incident reconstruction. Nevertheless, modern investigations are challenged by the scale of Registry data, the fragmentation of evidence across hives and complementary sources, and the need to prioritise investigative actions under time pressure. This paper presents WinRegRL, a hybrid framework that combines a Markov Decision Process (MDP) solved by dynamic programming with bounded Reinforcement Learning (RL) refinement and Rule-based Artificial Intelligence (RB-AI) for automated Windows Registry and timeline-centred forensic analysis. Methodologically, the core planner is a finite-state dynamic-programming solver over an expert-specified model; reinforcement learning enters only as bounded, local tabular refinement for low-support state-action regions, so the framework is positioned as an MDP/dynamic-programming approach with bounded RL rather than as an end-to-end learned agent. The framework models the investigation process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with explicitly defined states, actions, transition dynamics, and reward design, and incorporates expert-derived policy graphs to initialise and refine the search strategy. We evaluate the framework on four heterogeneous forensic datasets spanning multiple Windows versions and incident scenarios, and we compare it against analyst-assisted baselines and controlled examiner-led workflows. Under the evaluation protocol adopted in this study, WinRegRL reduced investigation time by up to 68%, increased the number of adjudicated relevant artefacts identified by up to 35%, and achieved high artefact-level precision on the evaluated datasets. Rather than claiming universal superiority, we show that the proposed framework provides a reproducible and explainable decision-support mechanism that improves investigation efficiency while maintaining strong evidential coverage in the tested scenarios. These findings position WinRegRL as a promising decision-support framework for large-scale and time-critical Windows incident response.

Metabolomic signatures prior to in-hospital cardiac arrest: insights into potential therapeutic targets

Abstract Plasma metabolomic alterations occurring up to 48 h before in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) and their associations with return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) and in-hospital mortality (IHM) were evaluated in this exploratory case-control study. Adults with IHCA at a tertiary university hospital were identified, and archived serum samples collected within 48 h before the event were analyzed. For the ROSC analysis, patients with ROSC were matched to non-ROSC patients, while for the IHM analysis, patients with IHM were matched to survivors according to age, sex, initial IHCA rhythm, interval between sample collection and cardiac arrest, and major comorbidities. Untargeted metabolomic profiling was performed, and data was analyzed using complementary multivariate and univariate approaches. Candidate metabolites were further evaluated through qualitative assessment of their distribution across groups. Six metabolites initially differed between groups; however, after this refinement step, only two remained consistently associated with clinically relevant outcomes. Lower circulating tryptophan concentrations were associated with IHM, whereas higher levels of 2-methylbutyryl-L-carnitine were associated with failure to achieve ROSC and increased IHM. Pathway enrichment analysis suggested disruptions in mitochondrial energy metabolism, particularly within the tricarboxylic acid cycle, as well as alterations in amino acid–related pathways, including tryptophan, histidine, and alanine–aspartate–glutamate metabolism. These findings indicate that detectable metabolic disturbances are present up to 48 h before IHCA and are associated with clinical outcomes. As all patients in this study experienced IHCA, these results should be interpreted as differences between outcome groups rather than predictors of IHCA occurrence. Within this context, the findings support the concept that IHCA may represent the culmination of a progressive metabolic deterioration rather than an abrupt event, highlighting a potential window for earlier risk stratification and future investigation of preventive strategies.