The sample included 2,507 medical students. Depression-related symptoms were measured with the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, and social isolation was assessed with the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale-6, allowing the investigators to compare chatbot experiences with two validated measures of psychological distress. Students reported using conversational AI for several purposes.

Academic perceived support was the primary driver of engagement, cited by 88.8% of participants. Smaller proportions reported using chatbots for companionship, at 22.2%, or to cope with stress and loneliness, at 23.1%. Daily use was reported by 41.9% of respondents, indicating especially frequent engagement among a substantial minority of the surveyed students.

The survey found a high prevalence of mental-health and social-well-being difficulties among participants. Mild-to-severe depressive symptoms were present in 70.6% of students according to the PHQ-9, while 65.0% met the survey’s threshold for moderate-to-high loneliness according to the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale-6. The research therefore characterized chatbot use in a population already carrying a substantial burden of depressive symptoms and social isolation.

Students exhibiting higher levels of psychological distress were significantly more likely to report emotional connectivity, perceived companionship and subjective well-being benefits from their chatbot interactions. However, the authors noted that these correlations remained statistically weak. Because the study was cross-sectional, the measurements represent a snapshot rather than a sequence of events.

The findings nevertheless reveal that these systems occupied both educational and relational roles in the lives of the respondents. Academic support was the dominant reported function, but companionship and coping with stress or loneliness were meaningful uses for subsets of students. The authors described conversational AI as a scalable, low-barrier support mechanism in a conflict-affected setting where access to formal mental health services is severely restricted.

That accessibility does not make the observed benefits equivalent to treatment or establish the long-term safety of chatbot-based support. The study directly measured use, symptoms, loneliness and perceived benefits, but it did not demonstrate that chatbots prevented social isolation, reduced depressive symptoms or worsened either outcome. The authors called for responsible integration and longitudinal research to determine the long-term effects of AI-mediated support on student well-being.

Overall, the survey identifies broad chatbot engagement and substantial psychological distress among Sudanese medical students while highlighting the need for closer examination of how AI tools are used. Its clearest finding is not that chatbots provide a proven mental-health intervention, but that many students already consult them for academic help and some use them in emotionally oriented ways. The weak correlations and cross-sectional design leave the direction and consequences of those relationships unresolved.

Subject of Research: Associations between conversational AI use, depressive symptoms and loneliness among Sudanese medical students

Article Title: Conversational AI chatbots: a double-edged sword for mental health and social well-being among medical students

Article References: Ahmed, A., Mohamed, M. A. E., Ali, W. B. A., Eldouma, M. Y. M., Abdalla MohammedAli, R. M., Barakat, H. O. M., Alapoud, M. M., Ali, A. S. H., Alngar, Y. A. A., Ahmed, S. A. M., Osman, M. M. A., Gassemalseed, T. F. A., Gadallah, A. A., & Eljack, M. M. F. (2026). Conversational AI chatbots: a double-edged sword for mental health and social well-being among medical students. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10326-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10326-3

Keywords: conversational AI, medical students, Sudan, depressive symptoms, loneliness, cross-sectional survey, digital well-being, academic support, Conversational, chatbots, double-edged, sword

The research team, led by Maria Badraldin Ali Saga of Al-Neelain University and Ahmad Mohammad Al Zamel, conducted a cross-sectional survey between June and November 2025. Participants completed a structured, self-administered online questionnaire grounded in established behavioral frameworks, including the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation and Behavior model, a widely used framework that treats behavior as the product of psychological capability, physical and social opportunity, and reflective and automatic motivation. Preventive behaviors, peer influence, and institutional culture were each measured with Likert-scale items and summarized into composite scores, allowing the researchers to quantify how strongly each domain tracked with actual compliance.

The headline numbers reveal a telling asymmetry. Overall adherence to preventive health behaviors was generally favorable, but the consistency varied dramatically by practice. Hand hygiene showed the highest compliance at 66.4 percent, while mask use lagged at just 46.0 percent. That gap is itself informative: handwashing is a deeply embedded habit reinforced in nearly every clinical and non-clinical setting, whereas mask wearing depends more heavily on situational cues and social signaling. When the surrounding environment stops cueing a behavior, the behavior decays, a pattern consistent with decades of research on habit formation and behavioral maintenance.

To probe what was driving compliance, the researchers turned to Spearman correlation analysis, a non-parametric statistical technique that measures how tightly two variables move together without assuming a linear relationship. The analysis found significant positive correlations between preventive behaviors, peer influence, and perceived institutional culture, all at p < 0.01, meaning the probability of observing such associations by chance alone was less than one percent. Observational peer influence, particularly the role-modeling component, showed strong associations with adherence, with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.32 to 0.49. Institutional culture variables showed moderate associations, with coefficients between 0.43 and 0.52.

Correlation coefficients of this magnitude are meaningful in behavioral science. In social psychology, effect sizes around 0.3 are typically considered moderate, and values approaching 0.5 are substantial for predictors of complex human behavior. The fact that role modeling, the process by which students unconsciously calibrate their own actions to those of senior peers and near-peers, outperformed most other measured variables suggests that medical students are not primarily reasoning their way to compliance. They are imitating their way there. This aligns with observational learning theory, in which humans acquire behaviors by watching others perform them and inferring the consequences, a mechanism that operates largely outside conscious deliberation.

The multivariate linear regression analysis added a second layer of insight. Unlike simple correlation, regression allows researchers to isolate the independent contribution of each predictor while statistically adjusting for all others. In this model, demographic variables mostly fell away as significant predictors, but two stood out. First-year students demonstrated lower adherence, with a standardized beta coefficient of -0.92 and a p-value of 0.010, indicating that the association was unlikely to be a statistical fluke. Living with family was associated with higher compliance, with a beta of 0.28 and a p-value of 0.019. The large negative beta for first-year status suggests that the earliest stage of medical training is a critical window: students who have not yet absorbed the professional norms of clinical environments comply less, and the effect is substantial relative to the other measured predictors.

The finding on family living arrangements is equally intriguing from a behavioral science perspective. Students who live with family may benefit from a home environment that reinforces preventive practices, from shared hygiene routines to household expectations about illness prevention. In a resource-constrained setting like Khartoum, where the study was conducted amid ongoing economic and institutional pressures on Sudan’s health system, the household may function as a parallel site of behavioral reinforcement that clinical training alone cannot provide. The authors note that other demographic variables, including age, gender, and university affiliation, were not significant predictors once social and institutional factors were accounted for, a result that underscores how thoroughly contextual these behaviors are.

The theoretical implications reach beyond Sudan. The study’s framework draws on the COM-B model, which posits that behavior occurs when capability, opportunity, and motivation converge. In this study, the strongest measured predictors map onto the opportunity domain: social opportunity, expressed through peer norms and role modeling, and physical opportunity, expressed through institutional culture and environmental support. If the strongest levers of behavior are social and structural rather than informational, then knowledge-based interventions, the default approach in much of medical education, are targeting the wrong variable. Lectures on infection control can raise capability, but they cannot manufacture the social cues that make compliance automatic.

The authors argue that interventions leveraging peer influence, strengthening professional norms, and promoting supportive institutional cultures may be more effective than knowledge-based approaches alone, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where resources for behavioral infrastructure are limited. Practically, this could mean designing onboarding experiences that pair junior students with senior role models who visibly practice preventive behaviors, or reshaping institutional environments so that compliance cues, from sanitizer placement to supervisor behavior, are ubiquitous rather than optional. It could also mean treating the first year of medical school as a norm-setting period, since the regression data show that early students lag in adherence and that this gap likely closes as professional socialization proceeds.

The study has limitations inherent to its design. As a cross-sectional survey, it captures associations at a single point in time and cannot establish causation; it is possible that students who comply with preventive behaviors also perceive more peer influence and stronger institutional cultures, rather than the reverse. Self-reported data collected through online questionnaires are also vulnerable to social desirability bias, particularly among medical students who know what answers are professionally expected. Still, the consistency of the pattern across correlation and regression analyses, and the alignment with established behavioral frameworks, gives the findings weight. The research was approved by the National University Research Ethics Committee in Khartoum and carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with electronic informed consent obtained from all participants. As health systems worldwide continue to grapple with compliance gaps that persist despite widespread knowledge, this Sudanese study offers a pointed reminder that the most powerful determinant of whether a future doctor washes their hands may be the behavior of the person standing next to them.

Subject of Research: Health Behavior and Medical Education

Article Title: Observational peer influence and institutional culture as predictors of preventive health compliance among Sudanese medical students

Article References: Saga, M. B. A., Al Zamel, A. M., Abdelazim, K., Eldouma, M. Y. M., Eltohami, F. M., Alradi, T. A. M., Omer, H. F. E., Ahmed, O. M., abd elbasit Ahmed, D. E., Elmadani, M. E. H., Azhari, O. A., Abdalla, S. F., & Saeed, A. A. (2026). Observational peer influence and institutional culture as predictors of preventive health compliance among Sudanese medical students. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10638-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10638-4

Keywords: peer influence, institutional culture, preventive health behaviors, medical students, Sudan, hand hygiene, COM-B model, medical education, social norms, BMC Medical Education, Observational, peer

The finding carries real technical weight because it reframes a long-standing clinical question. Sickle cell anemia results from a single point mutation in the beta-globin gene that causes hemoglobin S polymerization under low oxygen conditions, leading to the characteristic sickling of red blood cells, vaso-occlusive crises, chronic hemolysis, and progressive organ damage. For decades, clinicians have debated whether children with sickle cell anemia face heightened susceptibility to intestinal parasites, either because of altered gut immunity, repeated transfusions, nutritional deficits, or the general frailty that accompanies chronic hemolytic disease. The Kosti data suggest the answer is no, at least not in a way that shows up as a measurable difference in infection prevalence. Instead, the parasites appear to be an extrinsic problem, driven by contaminated water, poor sanitation, and living conditions that expose all children in the region regardless of their hemoglobin genotype.

The parasite landscape itself tells a detailed story. Among children with sickle cell anemia, Giardia intestinalis dominated at 62 percent, followed by Entamoeba histolytica or Entamoeba dispar at 54 percent, Entamoeba coli at 31 percent, and Hymenolepis nana at 1 percent. Among non-sickle cell children, the picture shifted: Entamoeba coli was the most common parasite at 69 percent, with the other species present at lower rates. Giardia intestinalis, a flagellated protozoan that colonizes the small intestine and disrupts nutrient absorption through its adherence to the intestinal wall, emerged as the dominant pathogen in the sickle cell group. This is significant because Giardia infection can compound the nutritional challenges that children with sickle cell anemia already face, given their elevated metabolic demands and the growth delays that often accompany chronic hemolysis.

The distinction between Entamoeba histolytica and Entamoeba dispar deserves particular attention. These two species are morphologically identical under light microscopy, which is why the study reports them together as a single category. Entamoeba histolytica is the pathogenic species responsible for amoebic dysentery and invasive disease, capable of destroying host tissue through its cytotoxic activity, while Entamoeba dispar is generally regarded as non-pathogenic. Without molecular differentiation techniques such as polymerase chain reaction, the true proportion of pathogenic infections within that 54 percent category remains uncertain. This is a recognized limitation of microscopy-based parasitology in resource-limited settings, where the formal ether concentration technique and direct wet mount remain the standard diagnostic tools.

The diagnostic methodology itself is worth unpacking. Each of the 200 stool samples was examined using two complementary techniques: direct wet preparation, which allows rapid visualization of motile trophozoites in fresh samples, and the formal ether concentration technique, which concentrates cysts, ova, and larvae from larger stool volumes to increase sensitivity. The concentration step is critical because many intestinal parasites shed intermittently, and direct examination alone can miss low-burden infections. By combining both approaches, the investigators maximized their detection capacity, though even this dual method cannot distinguish morphologically identical species or detect parasites present below the threshold of microscopic visibility.

Age emerged as a meaningful risk factor in the analysis. Infection prevalence was higher among children older than five years, a pattern consistent with the epidemiology of intestinal parasites in endemic regions. Older children spend more time playing outdoors, have wider contact with contaminated soil and water, and are less likely to be exclusively breastfed or protected within household environments that shield infants from environmental exposure. This age gradient also aligns with the natural history of Giardia and Entamoeba transmission, which depends on ingestion of contaminated food or water and fecal-oral spread within households and communities.

The clinical implications for sickle cell care are substantial. Children with sickle cell anemia already contend with a cascade of complications: recurrent vaso-occlusive pain crises, acute chest syndrome, stroke risk, splenic dysfunction that impairs immune defense against encapsulated bacteria, and chronic anemia that requires careful transfusion management. Adding a heavy parasitic burden to this picture creates a dangerous synergy. Giardia infection impairs fat and carbohydrate absorption and can cause malabsorption syndromes that worsen growth failure. Entamoeba histolytica, when genuinely pathogenic, causes bloody diarrhea and can invade the intestinal wall, potentially triggering systemic inflammation in children whose bodies are already stressed by chronic hemolysis. Even non-pathogenic parasites like Entamoeba coli serve as markers of fecal contamination, signaling that a child is being repeatedly exposed to enteric pathogens, some of which may be bacterial or viral and harder to detect.

What makes the study particularly valuable is its case-control design within a single emergency department setting. By recruiting both sickle cell and non-sickle cell children from the same pediatric emergency population, the investigators controlled for many confounders that typically plague parasitology studies in endemic areas. Both groups came from the same geographic catchment, faced similar water and sanitation conditions, and were examined with identical diagnostic protocols. The near-identical prevalence rates, 86 percent versus 82 percent, therefore represent a clean comparison rather than an artifact of different sampling frames. The absence of a statistically significant association between sickle cell status and parasitic infection is a finding that should redirect clinical attention from genetic predisposition toward environmental intervention.

The public health message that follows is direct. If intestinal parasitic infections are driven by extrinsic factors rather than by sickle cell biology, then the solution lies in water treatment, sanitation infrastructure, hygiene education, and routine deworming and antiparasitic programs that target all children in the community, not just those with hemoglobin disorders. Sudan, like many tropical countries, faces persistent challenges with intestinal parasites, and the extraordinarily high prevalence documented in Kosti, exceeding 80 percent in both groups, reflects a level of environmental contamination that demands systemic response. For the sickle cell community specifically, the study suggests that pediatric sickle cell clinics in endemic regions should incorporate routine stool screening and antiparasitic treatment into standard care, not because sickle cell patients are uniquely vulnerable, but because they are being exposed at the same rate as everyone else while carrying a chronic condition that makes any additional insult more dangerous.

The research team, led by Abdelhakam G. Tamomh of the University of El Imam El Mahdi in Kosti, working with colleagues in Sudan and Ghana, conducted the study with institutional ethics approval and informed consent from all participants or their parents, adhering to the Declaration of Helsinki. The work received no external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests. Published as an open access article under a Creative Commons license, the study adds to a growing body of evidence that the health burdens of children with sickle cell anemia in resource-limited settings cannot be addressed through hematology alone. The parasites in their guts are a community problem, and solving it requires looking beyond the blood smear to the water supply, the toilet, and the playground.

Subject of Research: Parasitology and Pediatric Hematology

Article Title: Intestinal parasitic infections and associated risk factors in Sudanese pediatric sickle cell patients

Article References: Tamomh, A. G., Walana, W., Ibrahim, R. M., Elamin, E., Ali, M. O., Ali, H. O., & Aldaw, T. H. (2026). Intestinal parasitic infections and associated risk factors in Sudanese pediatric sickle cell patients. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07647-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07647-z

Keywords: intestinal parasitic infections, sickle cell anemia, Sudan, pediatric health, Giardia intestinalis, Entamoeba histolytica, public health, BMC Pediatrics, Intestinal, parasitic, infections, associated

The research, led by Hiba Abdelmunim Suliman Elsheikh of the National University and Almughtarbeen University in Khartoum, together with colleagues across Sudan and Saudi Arabia, surveyed 384 adult cancer patients between June and August 2025 at two oncology centers in River Nile State. All participants had been diagnosed before April 2023, meaning every person in the cohort was already navigating cancer treatment when the fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces began. Just over half of the respondents, 203 patients or 52.9 percent, were internally displaced by the time they were surveyed, and 233 patients, or 60.7 percent, were female.

The technical design of the study matters for interpreting its results. The team used convenience sampling and a validated questionnaire, then analyzed the data with descriptive statistics and chi-square or Fisher’s exact tests in SPSS version 27, applying a conventional significance threshold of p ≤ 0.05. To untangle which factors independently predicted psychological harm, the researchers turned to multivariable ordinal logistic regression, a statistical approach suited to outcomes ordered from none through mild and moderate to severe. This allowed them to estimate the strength of association between specific war-related exposures and escalating levels of psychological impact, while controlling for other variables in the model.

The headline numbers are grim. Difficulty accessing cancer treatment because of the war was reported by 263 patients, or 68.5 percent of the cohort. When the researchers probed why, the barriers clustered into four dominant categories: financial constraints, cited by 190 patients or 72.2 percent of those reporting access problems; medication shortages, cited by 175 or 66.5 percent; travel difficulties or insecurity, cited by 163 or 62.0 percent; and limited availability of healthcare professionals, cited by 129 or 49.0 percent. Treatment interruptions, the clinical consequence of these barriers, were reported by 161 patients, or 41.9 percent. In oncology, where radiotherapy and chemotherapy schedules are calibrated to tumor biology and cell-cycle kinetics, interruptions of even a few weeks can compromise local control and survival, making this figure a proxy for measurable clinical risk rather than mere inconvenience.

The psychological toll was equally severe. A total of 138 patients, or 35.9 percent, reported severe psychological impacts, with additional patients experiencing moderate or mild levels. The regression analysis revealed which exposures independently drove this escalation. Difficulty accessing treatment carried a coefficient of B = 0.961 (95% CI: 0.385–1.536, p = 0.001), meaning patients facing access barriers were significantly more likely to slide toward severe psychological outcomes. Skipping or postponing treatment sessions was similarly predictive, with B = 1.035 (95% CI: 0.258–1.811, p = 0.009). Exposure to security threats independently predicted psychological harm as well, with B = 0.610 (95% CI: 0.093–1.128, p = 0.021).

But the strongest signal in the entire model belonged to family economic difficulty. Patients whose families faced moderate economic strain showed a coefficient of B = 2.283 (95% CI: 1.425–3.142, p < 0.001), and those facing severe economic hardship showed B = 3.666 (95% CI: 2.768–4.564, p < 0.001). In practical terms, financial collapse within a household was the single most powerful predictor of psychological deterioration among Sudanese cancer patients in the study, outstripping even direct exposure to violence. This finding reframes the crisis: the war’s most corrosive effect on mental health in this population may operate through economic destruction rather than through the sound of gunfire alone.

The study’s authors identified limited access to health professionals and security-related travel barriers as the most important challenges overall, a ranking that reflects the structural anatomy of a health system in freefall. Sudan’s oncology infrastructure was already thin before the conflict; the National Cancer Institute in Wad Medani, referenced in the study’s abbreviations, was among the facilities affected as fighting spread. When oncologists, pharmacists, and radiotherapy technicians flee or are displaced, and when supply chains for cytotoxic drugs and supportive medications fracture, the remaining patients face a cascade: no professional to prescribe, no pharmacy to dispense, no road safe enough to travel.

What makes this research particularly valuable is its timing and its specificity. Empirical evidence on cancer care during armed conflict in low- and middle-income countries remains scarce, and most of what exists is anecdotal or drawn from facility-level reports. By surveying patients directly and applying formal statistical modeling, the Sudanese team converted lived experience into quantifiable associations. The convenience sampling design and the restriction to two centers in River Nile State, a relatively accessible region that absorbed large numbers of displaced people, do impose limits on generalizability, and the authors acknowledge that the findings describe patients who managed to reach care at all. The true population-level picture is likely worse, since patients unable to reach any facility were by definition excluded from the sample.

The clinical implications extend beyond Sudan. Cancer care depends on continuity in a way few other medical specialties do: a surgical resection cannot be postponed indefinitely, a radiotherapy course cannot be paused without consequence, and a chemotherapy protocol cannot be improvised from whatever drugs happen to be available. The study’s conclusion calls for urgent implementation of conflict-adapted strategies, including safe and flexible care delivery, maintenance of treatment continuity, and essential psychosocial support in resource-limited settings. Translated into practice, this could mean decentralized chemotherapy administration, telemedicine consultations for patients in insecure areas, buffer stocks of essential cytotoxic agents, and routine psychological screening embedded within oncology follow-up.

For the 384 patients who participated, the study is a documentation of a catastrophe in progress. For the global health community, it is a warning about what happens when cancer care is left out of humanitarian planning. The war in Sudan has severely disrupted oncology services, limited access to treatment, interrupted continuity of care, and worsened psychological and economic burdens, and the associations identified in this research, between financial hardship, medication shortages, insecurity, and poorer mental health outcomes, offer a roadmap for intervention. Whether that roadmap is followed before more patients lose both their treatment and their psychological resilience remains an open question, one that the answers to this study can no longer defer.

Subject of Research: Health & Medicine

Article Title: Cancer care in a fragile health system: effects of armed conflict on access, continuity, and mental health in Sudan

Article References: Elsheikh, H. A. S., Hamadalneel, Y. B., Hamed, M. M. O., Taha, L. G. M., Suliman, Y. A., Hamid, A., Taifor, T. A., Mohamed, R. M. A., & Al Zamel, A. M. (2026). Cancer care in a fragile health system: effects of armed conflict on access, continuity, and mental health in Sudan. BMC Cancer. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12885-026-17189-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12885-026-17189-3

Keywords: Sudan, armed conflict, cancer care, oncology, treatment disruption, psychological impact, healthcare access, BMC Cancer, global health, humanitarian crisis, Cancer, care

The research team, led by Ibrahim Magboul of Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman and Diaeldin Osman of Clark Atlanta University, surveyed 201 employees across Sudan’s three major telecommunication operators — Zain, MTN, and Sudani — all headquartered in the capital, Khartoum. Using a purposive sampling technique, the researchers distributed 291 questionnaires between July and August 2023 and achieved a 69 percent valid response rate. Respondents ranged from junior staff to top-level executives, with 60 percent identifying as middle-level employees. Most had substantial hands-on experience with analytics tools: 60 percent had used big data analytics for one to three years, and 90 percent reported generating reports with these tools twice a day.

What makes the study methodologically distinctive is its integration of four established theoretical frameworks into a single validated model. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) captures individual user perceptions at the micro level; the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework captures organizational context at the meso level; the IS Success Model focuses on information and system characteristics; and the Resource-Based View (RBV) explains how analytics capabilities become strategic resources. The authors argue that big data adoption is a multi-level phenomenon that no single theory can adequately explain, and that the causal mechanisms identified in developed economies may not universally apply in resource-constrained environments.

To test their model, the researchers deployed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), a statistical technique that estimates relationships between latent constructs while accounting for measurement error. The analysis used 5,000 bootstrap subsamples with bias-corrected 95 percent confidence intervals. Before testing the structural paths, the team rigorously validated the measurement model: all factor loadings exceeded the 0.7 threshold recommended by Hair and colleagues, all Cronbach’s alpha values surpassed 0.7, composite reliability exceeded 0.7 for every construct, and average variance extracted exceeded 0.50, confirming convergent validity. Discriminant validity was confirmed using both the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio, with all values below the 0.9 threshold. Variance inflation factors stayed well below 3.3, ruling out pathological collinearity and common method bias.

The structural results were striking. Six of the eight hypothesized antecedents significantly predicted big data analytics adoption. Information quality emerged as the strongest driver, with a path coefficient of 0.397 (t = 7.048, p < 0.001), confirming that accurate, complete, consistent, and timely data is the single most powerful enabler of analytics success. Information center support followed at 0.239 (t = 3.511), vendor support at 0.201 (t = 3.173), business-IT alignment at 0.195 (t = 3.703), big data culture at 0.154 (t = 2.891), and training at 0.149 (t = 2.955). All six effects were statistically significant at the 5 percent level.

But two findings defied expectations. Big data competency — the organization’s collective ability to manage, analyze, and derive insights from big data — showed essentially no effect on adoption (β = 0.001, t = 0.020, p = 0.984). Perceived usefulness, the core TAM construct capturing an employee’s belief that analytics tools enhance job performance, was similarly non-significant (β = 0.011, t = 0.267, p = 0.790). The authors interpret these null results not as measurement failures but as theoretically generative anomalies that reveal something fundamental about technology adoption in extreme resource-constrained environments.

For big data competency, the researchers propose a “capability-use gap”: organizations may possess competent personnel but lack the complementary infrastructure, managerial prioritization, or resource alignment necessary to translate that competency into actual adoption. Sudan’s telecom sector faces persistent challenges including electricity outages, limited bandwidth, and outdated computing equipment — and since April 2023, armed conflict has disrupted telecommunications infrastructure across the country. Three mechanisms may explain the finding: infrastructural dependency, where skills alone cannot compensate for inadequate hardware and networks; strategic misalignment, where competent employees work in departments where analytics is not prioritized by top management; and a measurement-reality gap, where survey-based self-reports overstate actual capabilities or distribute them unevenly across departments.

The non-significant perceived usefulness result challenges the universal applicability of TAM itself. The authors suggest a “feasibility-before-perception” pathway: in Sudan’s telecom sector, adoption decisions may be constrained by external feasibility barriers — electricity outages, internet instability, hardware unavailability, and conflict-related infrastructure destruction — that render perceptions of usefulness irrelevant if the technology cannot physically be used. Mandatory adoption policies and “symbolic adoption,” where organizations claim analytics usage for legitimacy without substantive implementation, may further disconnect employee perceptions from actual behavior. The authors propose that future research test a “reverse TAM” model in which objective infrastructural conditions predict perceived usefulness and ease of use, rather than the traditional path where perceptions predict adoption intentions.

Crucially, the study confirms that big data analytics adoption has a strong positive effect on perceived performance (β = 0.647, t = 15.871, p < 0.001). The model explained 66.1 percent of the variance in analytics adoption and 41.9 percent in perceived performance — both classified as substantial predictive ability under Cohen’s criteria. This finding aligns with prior research showing that analytics-enabled sensing capabilities and analytics-driven cultures improve organizational outcomes, and it assures managers that the technology can deliver measurable business value even in difficult operating environments.

The practical implications are clear. Managers should carefully select analytics vendors with deep telecommunications experience, invest in continuous training in data literacy and visualization, institute robust data governance policies to safeguard information quality, and strengthen business-IT alignment so that analytics initiatives connect to strategic objectives. The authors recommend that governments in developing countries initiate technology interventions specifically aimed at helping companies adopt analytics tools that promote better performance. The study’s limitations — a sample drawn from only three operators in one country, a cross-sectional design, and the extraordinary circumstances of data collection during an active armed conflict — suggest future research should expand to larger samples, other sectors, and longitudinal designs. But the core message stands: in resource-constrained environments, feasibility comes before perception, and infrastructure, data quality, and external support are the true engines of analytics success.

Subject of Research: Big data analytics adoption and perceived performance in Sudanese telecommunication companies

Article Title: An empirical test of antecedents and perceived performance of big data analytics in telecommunication companies

Article References: Magboul, I., Osman, D., Herzallah, F., Osman, A. N., & Gittens, D. (2026). An empirical test of antecedents and perceived performance of big data analytics in telecommunication companies. Frontiers in Big Data, 9, Article 1763520. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2026.1763520

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fdata.2026.1763520

Keywords: big data analytics, telecommunications, Sudan, structural equation modeling, technology acceptance model, developing countries, empirical, test, antecedents, perceived, performance, data

Soil is the largest terrestrial carbon pool on Earth, storing an estimated 1,500 to 1,600 petagrams of carbon in its top meter — more than all vegetation and the atmosphere combined. Yet quantifying how much carbon sits in any given hectare of soil remains notoriously difficult, because organic carbon varies with soil type, climate, topography, vegetation, and land use. Sudan makes the challenge especially urgent: its central clay plain holds roughly 70 million hectares of Vertisols, about 16 percent of the global total, ranking the country third worldwide after India and Australia. These heavy, montmorillonite-dominated cracking clays are among the most fertile yet most fragile agricultural soils in the tropics.

The research team, led by Faroug A. H. Jadalla of the Pan African University Life and Earth Sciences Institute and the Agricultural Research Corporation in Wad Medani, assembled an extraordinary dataset: 2,235 soil samples spanning four decades, from 1981 to 2024. Rather than throwing the legacy data away, the team harmonized it with rigorous corrections. Walkley-Black wet digestion values were multiplied by 1.15 to match dry combustion equivalents, profiles were standardized to a common 0–30 centimeter depth using equal-area spline functions, and all stocks were corrected to an equivalent soil mass to remove bulk density artifacts. After screening out points with poor GPS accuracy or documented land-use change, 554 spatially unique, quality-controlled profiles remained for modeling.

Regression kriging works in two stages. First, a stepwise multiple linear regression relates measured SOC stocks to environmental covariates that satellites and terrain models can observe everywhere. Second, the residuals — the part of the variation the regression cannot explain — are interpolated with ordinary kriging, exploiting the spatial correlation of the leftover signal. The final prediction combines the deterministic trend with the stochastic residual surface. In this study, the regression equation included NDVI, clay content, a drought-modified wetness index, the bare soil index, and precipitation, achieving an adjusted R² of 0.64 with no multicollinearity issues.

The covariates themselves came from an impressive array of sources. Spectral indices were derived from Landsat 9 imagery captured in April 2024, coinciding with the contemporary soil survey. Climate data — precipitation, temperature, and relative humidity — came from CHIRPS v2.0 and WorldClim v2.1, aggregated as 30-year climatological normals from 1994 to 2024. Terrain attributes, including elevation, slope, aspect, and the topographic wetness index, were calculated from the 30-meter Shuttle Radar Topography Mission digital elevation model. Land use and land cover data from the FAO SWALIM regional classification were updated through field verification during the 2024 campaign. All rasters were resampled to a common 30-meter resolution for spatial consistency.

The results reveal a striking spatial pattern. Predicted SOC stocks in the top 30 centimeters ranged from 12.4 to 51.2 megagrams of carbon per hectare, with a mean of 28.6 Mg C ha⁻¹. Stocks were highest in the south and east of the study area, where rainfall reaches 750 millimeters per year, and lowest in the drier north and west. Land use mattered enormously: irrigated agriculture held the highest stocks at 51.2 ± 8.4 Mg C ha⁻¹, followed by forest and woodland at 42.1 ± 9.2, grassland and pasture at 34.9 ± 7.8, and rain-fed agriculture at 28.5 ± 6.9. Bare, degraded land held the lowest stocks at just 14.2 ± 4.3 Mg C ha⁻¹ — and, tellingly, the least variable, suggesting these carbon-poor systems have reached a homogeneous, depleted equilibrium.

The strongest predictors tell a coherent physical story. Clay content correlated with SOC at r = 0.84, reflecting how 2:1 swelling clay minerals physically protect organic matter from microbial decomposition through organo-mineral complexation and reduced microbial access. NDVI, the satellite-derived vegetation index, correlated at r = 0.72, capturing the influence of plant productivity on organic matter inputs. The bare soil index showed a strong negative correlation at r = −0.83, effectively discriminating vegetated, carbon-rich areas from bare, degraded ones. Relative humidity (r = 0.82) and precipitation (r = 0.75) reinforced the moisture-driven pattern, while temperature showed a negative correlation at r = −0.72, consistent with accelerated decomposition in hotter zones.

Model validation was deliberately conservative. Rather than random cross-validation, which would have inflated the apparent accuracy to R² ≈ 0.85, the team used spatial k-fold cross-validation with a 500-meter buffer between training and validation points. This yielded R² = 0.72, RMSE = 8.4 Mg C ha⁻¹ (29 percent of the mean observed stock), and a mean bias of just −0.8 Mg C ha⁻¹. Regression kriging outperformed multiple linear regression by 26 percent in RMSE and ordinary kriging by 9 percent, confirming the advantage of combining regression with geostatistical interpolation of residuals. The kriging standard error ranged from ±2.1 to ±8.4 Mg C ha⁻¹, with 95 percent confidence interval coverage of 91.3 percent — reasonably well-calibrated, though slightly under-covering in areas where legacy data clustered.

The uncertainty map itself is a scientific contribution. Prediction error was lowest in the central clay plain, where decades of legacy sampling and large irrigation schemes provide dense, consistent coverage. It was highest in the sparsely sampled northern and western regions, near the structurally complex Ethiopian escarpment margin, and in transition zones between agricultural and bare land. This spatially explicit uncertainty picture tells decision-makers exactly where additional sampling would most improve the national carbon inventory — a resource that legacy soil databases in Africa, often concentrated in accessible agricultural areas, rarely provide.

For Sudan, the study delivers the first validated SOC stock baseline across the Blue Nile Vertisols, suitable for national greenhouse gas reporting and for targeting soil carbon sequestration interventions. The authors caution that the cross-sectional design — a single 2024 field campaign combined with legacy profiles — cannot causally attribute land-use differences to irrigation or cultivation history; the higher stocks in irrigated agriculture reflect water availability and alluvial inputs rather than tillage effects, which typically accelerate decomposition. Still, the message is clear: in semi-arid Vertisols, water management, not cultivation per se, governs carbon sequestration. As climate change intensifies drought stress across the Sahel, maps like these — showing where carbon lives, where it has vanished, and where it could return — may become as vital to agricultural planning as rainfall forecasts themselves.

Subject of Research: Spatial prediction of soil organic carbon stocks in Sudanese clay soils using regression kriging

Article Title: Spatial prediction of soil organic carbon stocks in Sudanese clay soils using regression kriging

Article References: Jadalla, F. A. H., Oluwasemire, K. O., Elmobarak, A. E. A., & Zein, M. A. M. M. (2026). Spatial prediction of soil organic carbon stocks in Sudanese clay soils using regression kriging. Spanish Journal of Soil Science, 16, Article 16733. https://doi.org/10.3389/sjss.2026.16733

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/sjss.2026.16733

Keywords: soil organic carbon, regression kriging, Sudan, Vertisols, digital soil mapping, Blue Nile, carbon sequestration, semi-arid agriculture, Landsat 9, climate mitigation, Spatial, prediction

The research team, led by Fiona Flintan of the International Livestock Research Institute, set out to fill a conspicuous gap in how the world measures land security. Global initiatives such as Prindex, which surveyed 107,849 people across 108 countries in its second round completed in 2024, ask individuals whether they could lose their land or property. But these instruments are built around private, individual ownership and largely ignore collective tenure systems, the customary, community-based arrangements that are estimated to cover roughly 3.1 billion hectares of the planet. Rangelands alone span 54 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface, and virtually all of them are governed as commons, with nested layers of rights allocated to herders, grass cutters, beekeepers, gum collectors and, increasingly, encroaching farmers. For the women who depend on these landscapes, the relevant question is not whether their names appear on a certificate but whether the group’s rights are robust and whether the group will protect them as members.

The study deliberately selected three pastoralist communities known to have well-functioning customary governance: the Wakilé Allah Fulani clan in Zoundwéogo Province, Burkina Faso, numbering around 3,000 people; the Bagagir community of North Kordofan, Sudan, around 2,000 people bound by common ancestry; and the Waldaa Boran of northern Marsabit, Kenya, settled in their area since the early 1980s. Between 2022 and 2023, the researchers ran twelve focus group discussions, mixed and sex-segregated, involving 18 participants in Burkina Faso, 33 in Sudan and 23 in Kenya. Sessions began with participatory mapping of grazing lands and moved on to a technique more familiar from survey research than from village discussion: probabilistic questioning. Participants were asked how likely it was that they would lose their land, or their freedom to move livestock, within one year, five years, ten years, or over a lifetime, and whether their children would inherit the community’s rights of access and mobility.

The answers split sharply along lines that had little to do with formal law and everything to do with social structure. Among the Bagagir in Sudan, most men and women said it was unlikely or very unlikely that they would lose their lands or mobility at any point in their lifetime. The community, which has occupied Rahad el Tamor for more than a century, considers itself asyad elarid, landowners, on the strength of first settlement and four generations of uninterrupted use, even though the land formally belongs to the state. Their confidence rested on three pillars: a strong sense of historical rights, membership in the wider and respected Kababish confederation that can be called upon for support, and an abundance of good grazing land with no mineral deposits to attract competition. In Kenya, the Waldaa also reported strong group cohesion, reinforced by the 2016 Community Land Act, which the community sees as a route to further strengthening tenure because men and women alike can be listed in the registration document. Yet the Waldaa perceived relatively high short-term insecurity, driven not by weaknesses within the group but by the slow pace of land registration and by the unsettling example of the LAPSSET transport corridor, where neighbouring communities in Isiolo have been sidelined from decisions and removed from their land.

The Wakilé Allah of Burkina Faso told a different story. The community arrived only about 45 years ago, after severe droughts pushed them south from northern Burkina Faso, and they live on land ultimately controlled by the chief of their Bissa farmer hosts. Most respondents, including women and youth, said it was somewhat likely or very likely that the group would lose access to its most important grazing land, and its mobility, within the next one to five years. Agricultural encroachment, privatization of peri-urban land, mining, and weak law enforcement were cited as the main threats, and women in particular highlighted weakening social cohesion. Yet in a striking inconsistency, about half of respondents were very confident that their children would inherit community rights, reasoning that educated children would be better placed to defend those rights in the long run. Men held this long-term hope more firmly than women, and younger participants were markedly more pessimistic than their elders, who trusted the village chief’s wisdom and the value of ongoing negotiations.

Beneath these national contrasts, the study uncovered a common technical pattern with major policy implications. Perceived tenure security in these pastoralist systems is produced socially rather than legally. Group solidarity, reciprocity and institutionalized leadership emerged as the protective factors cited by both men and women in all three sites. In Sudan, the social architecture is elaborate: nafir, organized voluntary collective labour for households in need, and fazza, a communal effort to recover stolen animals, keep mutual obligation alive, while widowed and unmarried women receive support from relatives and neighbours. In Burkina Faso, pastoralists have united to protest encroachment on their lands, and both men and women said open dialogue with host communities was among the most important factors preventing the loss of their rights. When those dialogues weakened, perceived insecurity rose. The researchers found that women often placed even greater emphasis than men on cohesion and communication as the sinews of tenure security.

The findings push back against the standard narrative in which pastoralist women are portrayed simply as victims of male-dominated institutions. In Sudan, although cultural norms restrict young women’s mobility and keep women out of formal decision-making, the women interviewed did not express dissatisfaction; they valued the security the group provided and the certainty of assistance in times of need. In Kenya, Waldaa women go further: they have historically been included in the council of elders as equal and capable members, their land rights are described as a birthright equal to men’s, and this central involvement appears to sharpen their knowledge of threats and opportunities, including the benefits of registration under the Community Land Act. Only in Burkina Faso, where the pastoral system is newer, more precarious and under greater external pressure, did women report less knowledge of tenure issues, less influence over decisions and less confidence in their leaders, though even there they located the principal threat outside the group, in expanding farming, rather than within their own institutions.

The study also documents why the alternative, privatization, can be dangerous for women. In Kenya, women lost out during the dismantling of group ranches, with individual titles granted primarily to men. In India, Maldahari pastoralist women have lost community status as mechanized crop farming displaces pastoral roles. Researchers describe such women as falling between two stools: unprotected by a weakening customary system and unprotected by a formal legal system that never reaches them. Individual titling may deliver short-term reassurance, but over the long term it shrinks the commons, erodes the group and can leave women with less access to shared resources than they had as members of a collective. Meanwhile, growing numbers of unmarried pastoralist women living alone face new vulnerabilities that neither regime adequately addresses.

The authors are careful about the limits of their work. They purposively chose well-governed communities precisely to study collective dynamics relatively undisturbed by leadership conflict or mass outmigration, which means the findings cannot be generalized to contexts of weak governance or active conflict. The reliance on focus groups, without follow-up individual interviews or surveys, leaves room for triangulation in future research, and the study itself notes that even in well-ordered communities some members had ignored group rules and claimed land for individual use, fractures that leaders had to correct. Older participants worried that a more individualistic, market-oriented youth, drawn to gold mining and work abroad, could weaken the social fabric on which security depends, even as those same young people still relied on relatives to fund their ventures.

Nevertheless, the policy conclusions are pointed. Global land indicators and monitoring frameworks should explicitly measure collective tenure and perceptions of security within collectives, rather than relying solely on individual ownership metrics. Interventions aimed at strengthening women’s land rights should prioritize reinforcing collective governance institutions and women’s representation within them, with formalization pursued cautiously and in context. And legal processes such as Kenya’s Community Land Act should be implemented at a pace and in a manner that reinforces, rather than disrupts, customary institutions. As climate change intensifies pressure on the drylands, the study suggests that the most effective shelter for pastoralist women’s land rights may not be a piece of paper with one name on it, but the collective itself, its institutions, its social ties and the channels it opens for women’s voices.

Subject of Research: Pastoralist women's perceptions of land tenure security within collective tenure systems in Burkina Faso, Sudan and Kenya

Article Title: Pastoralist women’s perceptions of tenure security and implications for collective tenure regimes, policies and practices

Article References: Flintan, F., Nassef, M., Sawadogo, I., Sulieman, H., Otieno, K., Langdown, I., Locke, A., Meinzen-Dick, R., & Doss, C. (2026). Pastoralist women’s perceptions of tenure security and implications for collective tenure regimes, policies and practices. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 16, Article 16531. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16531

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/past.2026.16531

Keywords: land tenure security, pastoralism, women's land rights, collective tenure, rangelands, customary governance, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Kenya, commons, land indicators, climate resilience

The shells in question belong to Etheria elliptica, the African freshwater oyster, a bivalve that cements itself to rocks in fast-flowing water and grows by accreting discrete layers of calcium carbonate at its inner surface. Each layer locks in a chemical snapshot of the water in which it formed, recording both the temperature and the isotopic composition of the river at the moment of crystallization. Because shells of the species are typically 2 to 3 centimeters thick and up to 15 centimeters long, with clearly defined growth bands, they are ideal targets for serial stable isotope analysis, the technique of sampling successive growth layers individually to reconstruct environmental change across an animal’s lifetime.

The study, published in E&G Quaternary Science Journal, analyzed eleven fossil shells and three modern shells collected from the middle Atbara River between 2018 and 2022. The fossils came from three localities—Al Sharafa, Al Tomat, and Al Murabaa—within thick Pleistocene river deposits that have been dated using optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL, a technique that measures the time since quartz grains in the sediment were last exposed to sunlight. Those ages place the shell-bearing sediments between roughly 224,000 and 17,000 years old, spanning the late Middle and Late Pleistocene. The stratigraphic sequence is divided into units called the Butana Bridge Synthem and the Khashm El Girba Synthem, with the latter further split into KGS1, KGS2, and KGS3, each carrying its own age range.

The physics behind the oxygen isotope signal is elegantly simple. Rainfall delivers water enriched in the light isotope oxygen-16, lowering the δ18O ratio of river water during the wet season. During the dry season, evaporation preferentially removes the light isotope, concentrating heavier oxygen-18 and raising the ratio. Shells therefore record these swings as alternating depleted and enriched bands, and the overall spread of values within a shell serves as a proxy for the amplitude of seasonality. The researchers used the standard deviation and range of δ18O values within each specimen, rather than counting individual seasonal cycles, because the slowing growth rate of older oysters compresses the layers and makes cycle counting unreliable.

The results show that fossil and modern shells share broadly similar isotopic ranges, evidence that the seasonal contrast between the summer monsoon floods and the dry-season trickle has remained a persistent feature of the Atbara River system since at least about 200,000 years ago. Fossil δ18O values span from −2.4 to +5.9 per mil, while modern shells range from −6.4 to +1.5 per mil. The fossils are, on average, more enriched, which the authors interpret as a possible sign of more evaporative and drier conditions during the Pleistocene. But there is a modern complication: the Atbara is now regulated by two large dams, the Khashm El Girba Dam completed in 1964 and the Upper Atbara–Setit Dam Complex inaugurated in 2017, and altered flow regimes could equally explain the more depleted values in today’s shells.

One shell stands out from the rest. A specimen likely deriving from the oldest unit, BBS1, dated to around 224,000 years ago, shows both high variability and significantly more enriched oxygen values than any later shell, pointing to markedly drier and potentially more seasonal rainfall at that time. This fits with sedimentological work indicating more arid conditions during BBS times. By contrast, the seven shells from the KGS2 interval, roughly 130,000 to 60,000 years old, show the lowest variability of any interval, with a narrow range of about 2 per mil, hinting at slightly wetter conditions and reduced seasonal contrast. The authors suggest these long-term shifts were probably driven by orbital-scale forcing, particularly the precession cycle, which modulates summer insolation at low latitudes and shifts the Intertropical Convergence Zone, the main engine of Sahelian rainfall. A single shell from the younger KGS3 unit yielded depleted values, but X-ray diffraction showed it had partially transformed from aragonite to calcite, a diagenetic alteration that makes its oxygen signal untrustworthy, and it was excluded from interpretation.

Carbon isotopes told a different and more puzzling story. Shell δ13C reflects the dissolved inorganic carbon of the river, which in turn is influenced by atmospheric CO2, catchment vegetation, rock weathering, soil respiration, and the oysters’ own metabolism. Each stratigraphic interval showed a distinct carbon isotope range: the KGS shells were the most enriched, the older BBS shells intermediate, and the modern shells the most depleted. The team proposes that enriched Pleistocene values may reflect the much lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations of ice-age climates, around 260 parts per million during BBS times and roughly 180 parts per million during KGS2, while the depleted values in modern shells align with the post-industrial rise in CO2. Changes in vegetation, weathering, or biological factors could also contribute, and the absence of modern dissolved inorganic carbon data from the Atbara prevents a definitive answer. Notably, carbon and oxygen values showed no correlation, unlike in the Omo River shells studied previously, suggesting that carbon dynamics in the Atbara are decoupled from the seasonal water cycle.

To anchor the shell data, the team also measured the hydrogen and oxygen isotopes of river water itself and constructed the Atbara local meteoric water line from seven samples. The line, expressed as δD equal to 6.53 times δ18O plus 9.56, has a slightly lower slope than the global meteoric water line, pointing to strong evaporation and low relative humidity along the river, a pattern consistent with the water lines of the Blue Nile, White Nile, and main Nile. The inferred moisture sources feeding the Atbara’s rains include the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and recycled continental vapor. Because fossil and modern shells display comparable isotopic ranges, the authors argue that these same moisture sources likely also supplied the region during the Pleistocene, although deuterium cannot be measured in fossil shells to confirm it directly.

Beyond the numbers, the findings carry weight for understanding the deep history of African savannas and the humans who evolved within them. Rainfall magnitude and seasonality govern primary productivity and tree cover across the continent’s drylands, shaping the habitats available to mammals and hominins alike. Hominins have lived in African savannas for over six million years, and the Nile corridor and its tributaries, including the Atbara, may have served as routes providing food and freshwater during dispersals. The Atbara region contributes roughly 14 percent of the Nile’s total discharge, yet its paleoclimate record had remained a blind spot compared to the well-studied East African Rift Valley and South Africa. By demonstrating that strong precipitation seasonality has structured this landscape for at least 200 millennia, the study establishes a baseline against which the habitat context of Pleistocene human populations in the eastern Sahel can now be assessed.

The work is not without its limits, as the authors readily acknowledge. Specimen numbers are modest, particularly for the KGS3 and BBS1–2 intervals, and more modern water samples would be needed to firm up the meteoric water line. Still, the study marks the first application of serial isotope analysis to Etheria shells older than the early Holocene, opening a new window onto semi-arid river systems. Future work combining larger shell collections with modern monitoring of river water chemistry promises to sharpen these reconstructions further, and to reveal whether the relentless seasonal heartbeat of the Sahel will endure as the climate continues to change.

Subject of Research: Reconstruction of Pleistocene to recent rainfall seasonality in eastern Sudan using stable isotope analysis of freshwater oyster shells

Article Title: Paleoseasonality through serial stable isotope analysis of Pleistocene to recent Etheria elliptica shells from the middle Atbara River, eastern Sudan

Article References: Huseen, A., Bussert, R., Mohammednoor, M., Struck, U., Tsukamoto, S., Eisawi, A., & Bibi, F. (2026). Paleoseasonality through serial stable isotope analysis of Pleistocene to recent Etheria elliptica shells from the middle Atbara River, eastern Sudan. E&amp;G Quaternary Science Journal, 75(2), 173-190. https://doi.org/10.5194/egqsj-75-173-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/egqsj-75-173-2026

Keywords: paleoclimate, seasonality, stable isotopes, Etheria elliptica, Atbara River, Sudan, Pleistocene, OSL dating, Nile basin, savanna, oxygen isotopes, freshwater bivalves

The researchers drew on daily rainfall estimates from the CHIRPS satellite-based dataset and monthly soil moisture from the FLDAS Noah land-surface model, both averaged across the full administrative boundary of Gedaref State for the period 1982 to 2020. They supplemented these with annual sorghum and sesame records from the Gedaref State Ministry of Production and Economic Resources and the Mechanized Farming Corporation. Before anything else, the team checked how well the satellite rainfall product matched the available ground truth. Against a monthly station archive, CHIRPS showed a moderate seasonal correlation of 0.625, but agreement in absolute totals was limited, with a bias of minus 77.5 millimetres and a root mean square error of 130 millimetres. The authors attribute part of this discrepancy to the difference in spatial support: the station represents a single point in Gedaref town, while the satellite series averages across the entire state, including drier northern localities.

From the daily rainfall record, the researchers calculated four indicators designed to capture the main forms of within-season rainfall stress. The first was the April-to-November rainfall deficit, representing inadequate seasonal water supply. The second was the maximum number of consecutive dry days during the core June-to-September rainy period, a measure of the longest interruption in wetting. The third was onset delay, defined as the first date on or after 1 May when rainfall accumulated over three consecutive days reached 20 millimetres. The fourth was the share of seasonal rainfall delivered by the five wettest days, which captures how concentrated a season’s water supply is in a handful of violent storms. Across the record, these variables revealed striking variability: onset dates ranged from day 135 to day 240 of the year, maximum dry spells ranged from 2 to 13 days, and the five wettest days contributed between 10.2 and 21 percent of seasonal rainfall.

These four components were then combined into a single score, the Daily Rainfall-Structure Risk Index, or DRSRI, using principal component analysis. The analysis retained one component explaining 60.4 percent of the standardised variance, with coefficients of similar magnitude for all four variables, roughly 26, 25, 23 and 25 percent of the total weighting. Bootstrap resampling confirmed that no coefficient collapsed towards zero. Notably, an equal-weight version of the index correlated with the PCA version at 0.9997, meaning the sophisticated weighting made almost no practical difference to the annual ranking of risk. The index itself, however, turned out to be a powerful indicator of surface drying: higher DRSRI values coincided with lower modelled surface soil moisture anomalies in the top 10 centimetres of soil, with a correlation of minus 0.776 that was highly significant.

Yet the story took an unexpected turn when the researchers tested whether the index could actually predict soil moisture better than seasonal rainfall alone. Using a rolling-origin evaluation, in which models were trained on data from 1982 to 1996 and then progressively refitted as each new year arrived, the four rainfall-structure variables produced only a marginal and statistically unsupported improvement over seasonal rainfall, with root mean square errors of 0.544 versus 0.554 and a p-value of 0.739. The DRSRI alone performed worse than seasonal rainfall, with an RMSE of 0.681. The authors are candid about this result: the index is not a better predictor, but a better diagnostic. It tells you whether an unfavourable season was driven by low rainfall, late onset, a long dry spell, or concentrated storms, information that a single seasonal total cannot provide.

The agricultural analysis revealed perhaps the most consequential finding of the study. The clearest association was not with crop yields, as one might expect, but with the sorghum harvested-area ratio, the percentage of planted land reported as remaining productive through the season. This ratio was negatively correlated with DRSRI at minus 0.448 and positively correlated with seasonal rainfall at 0.440, both significant after false-discovery-rate correction. In contrast, no yield association for either sorghum or sesame remained statistically significant after multiple-testing correction. This distinction matters because yield measures output only from land recorded as productive, while the harvested-area ratio reflects how much planted land survived the season at all. In years with poor rainfall structure, farmers apparently lost a larger share of their planted area entirely.

The researchers also identified eight compound-risk years, 1984, 1990, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2009, 2013 and 2015, in which at least three of the four adverse rainfall conditions occurred simultaneously. In these years, modelled surface soil moisture anomalies averaged minus 0.970 standardised units compared with 0.250 in other years, and the sorghum harvested-area ratio anomaly averaged minus 0.956 versus 0.247. Both differences were highly significant. However, the classification proved sensitive to the thresholds used, with the exact set of flagged years changing under alternative percentile rules, even though the direction of the response remained stable. The authors frame this as an exploratory, impact-oriented classification rather than a formal definition of a multivariate climate extreme.

Two further findings complicate any simple narrative of worsening drought. First, a structural break detected after 1996 split the sorghum harvested-area record: the DRSRI association was strong before the break at minus 0.688 but weakened to minus 0.329 afterwards, while the seasonal rainfall association strengthened. Second, trend analysis after prewhitening and false-discovery-rate correction found no significant long-term change in any rainfall indicator between 1982 and 2020, yet the sorghum harvested-area ratio declined by about 9.2 percentage points per decade. This divergence suggests that the long-term deterioration in reported productive area was driven by factors other than rainfall, likely including the documented expansion of mechanised cultivation into more marginal clay plains, land degradation, and management or reporting changes.

The study is careful about its limits, and these caveats are instructive for anyone hoping to apply the approach elsewhere. The FLDAS soil moisture is modelled, not measured, and because CHIRPS rainfall contributes to the forcing of the FLDAS Noah model, the rainfall-moisture relationship represents internal consistency rather than independent validation. The Noah model also does not represent the cracking and preferential flow characteristic of the Vertisol clay soils that dominate Gedaref, adding further uncertainty. The state-wide averaging smooths local convective storms, meaning a wet day in the regional average does not guarantee rain on any particular field. The crop records, meanwhile, are annual administrative statistics lacking information on sowing dates, varieties, fertiliser use, pests, labour, or finance, all of which shape yields independently of rainfall.

For all these limitations, the work offers a practical template for drought monitoring in data-scarce drylands. The DRSRI can serve as a compact annual screening indicator, while its four components pinpoint the specific rainfall constraint operating in any given season. The authors suggest that early-season flags for delayed onset or extended dry spells could be overlaid with cropland and vegetation maps to direct field inspection where it is most needed. Future work, they argue, should move to pixel-level rainfall analysis within mapped cropland, compare satellite products against daily station observations, and incorporate independent soil moisture measurements. In a region where millions depend on rainfed sorghum and sesame, knowing not just how much rain fell but how it fell may prove the difference between anticipation and surprise.

Subject of Research: Within-season rainfall structure, modelled surface soil moisture and agricultural response in rainfed farming systems of eastern Sudan

Article Title: Rainfall structure and modelled surface soil moisture in relation to agricultural response in rainfed lands of eastern Sudan

Article References: Abaker, M., & Elfaki, J. (2026). Rainfall structure and modelled surface soil moisture in relation to agricultural response in rainfed lands of eastern Sudan. Discover Soil, 3(1), Article 181. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44378-026-00343-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44378-026-00343-5

Keywords: rainfall structure, soil moisture, rainfed agriculture, sorghum, sesame, drought, CHIRPS, FLDAS, Sudan, Gedaref, dry spells, compound climate risk

DISH is not a new discovery. The condition was first described in 1950 by the French rheumatologists Jacques Forestier and Jaume Rotes-Querol, who catalogued a striking pattern of bony overgrowth along the spines of older patients. Also known as Forestier’s disease or spondylitis ossificans ligamentosa, the disorder is characterized by the ossification of ligaments and entheses, the tough attachment points where soft tissue anchors to bone. The anterior and posterior longitudinal ligaments, which run along the front and back of the vertebral column, are among the most commonly affected structures, along with the ligaments of the vertebral arch. In essence, the flexible straps that hold the spine together slowly calcify into rigid bridges of bone.

Epidemiologically, DISH is far from rare. It affects primarily the elderly, with reported prevalence figures reaching 32.1 percent of men and 16.9 percent of women aged 80 and above in some populations. The condition has been studied extensively in Asia, particularly in Japan, where prevalence rates between 1.9 and 4.3 percent have been recorded. Yet its true global burden remains murky, because reported prevalence varies enormously depending on the population examined and the imaging methods used. Many people carry the diagnosis unknowingly: DISH can be completely asymptomatic, discovered only as an incidental finding on radiographs obtained for unrelated complaints.

When symptoms do appear, they range from painful stiffness and limited mobility to spinal deformity. More ominously, some patients develop myelopathy, a dysfunction of the spinal cord itself, typically when the posterior longitudinal ligament ossifies and narrows the spinal canal. The literature also documents stranger consequences: difficulty swallowing, shortness of breath, and noisy breathing caused by bony overgrowth compressing the pharynx, esophagus, or trachea. The exact cause of DISH remains unknown, but strong associations have been established with advancing age, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. Researchers believe these metabolic conditions promote the production of growth factors such as insulin-like growth factor 1, along with inflammatory mediators including interleukin-1 and interleukin-6, which stimulate osteoblast proliferation and drive bone deposition through the receptor activator of nuclear factor kappa-B ligand pathway. Genetic susceptibility has also been implicated, with evidence pointing to a locus on chromosome 6p related to posterior longitudinal ligament ossification, and additional contributions reported from protein-rich diets and sedentary work.

The Sudanese patient’s story began with two months of progressive weakness in both his arms and legs, accompanied by neck and back pain. He had lived with type 2 diabetes for 14 years, managed with oral medications, and reported no history of trauma. By the time he reached the clinic, he was wheelchair-bound. Neurological examination revealed spastic quadriparesis, weakness in all four limbs accompanied by increased muscle tone, with brisk reflexes at the supinator, knee, and ankle. His plantar responses were extensor, a classic upper motor neuron sign, and he exhibited a positive myelopathy hand sign as well as pseudoathetosis, the involuntary writhing of the fingers that occurs when the brain loses proprioceptive feedback from the hands when the eyes are closed. Sensation to vibration and joint position was diminished. Notably, his bowel and bladder function remained intact.

Imaging told the rest of the story. Computed tomography of the cervical spine showed straightening of the normal neck curvature, with extensive ossification of the anterior longitudinal ligament running the entire length of the cervical region. Critically, the posterior longitudinal ligament had also ossified inside the spinal canal, producing severe stenosis at the C5, C6, and C7 levels. Magnetic resonance imaging, though of suboptimal quality, confirmed multilevel flowing anterior ossification with relatively preserved intervertebral disc heights, a signature feature of DISH. At the mid-cervical levels, the spinal cord was visibly compressed, the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid space nearly obliterated, and subtle T2 signal changes within the cord itself suggested underlying compressive myelopathy. An additional MRI of the lumbosacral spine revealed a diffuse disc bulge at L3/L4 with hypertrophy of the ligamentum flavum, indenting the thecal sac and compressing nerve roots on both sides, plus milder degenerative changes at L5/S1. Laboratory and serological tests were all normal, excluding alternative rheumatologic diagnoses such as ankylosing spondylitis or rheumatoid arthritis.

Distinguishing DISH from its imitators is a diagnostic exercise with real consequences. In the 1970s, Donald Resnick and colleagues proposed criteria that remain the standard: flowing ossification extending across at least four adjacent vertebrae, relative preservation of disc height appropriate for the patient’s age, and an absence of apophyseal joint ankylosis or sacroiliac inflammatory change. The Sudanese patient met all of them. Degenerative spondylosis, by contrast, is driven by disc degeneration, osteophyte formation, and disc space narrowing, and typically produces pain and radiculopathy from disc herniation rather than ligamentous ossification. Ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory disease of younger patients, features sacroiliitis, syndesmophytes, the fused bamboo spine, and systemic inflammation, none of which characterize the non-inflammatory DISH of older adults. Myelopathy from posterior longitudinal ligament ossification is a hallmark of DISH but rare in spondylosis, and recognizing these distinctions matters because timely intervention can prevent irreversible neurological deterioration.

Treatment for the patient began conservatively with analgesics and physical therapy, and he was referred to the surgery department for cervical decompression and fixation. That operation never happened. The ongoing conflict in Sudan made access to healthcare services nearly impossible, and follow-up could be conducted only by telephone. After three months, the patient died suddenly, before the planned surgical intervention could be performed. The case authors are candid about this limitation: without surgery or detailed post-mortem evaluation, the precise cause of death remains unknown. What the case does establish is the trajectory of a treatable condition allowed to run its course by circumstances beyond medicine’s control, and the authors emphasize the importance of educating patients about their disease and the need to report new symptoms promptly when definitive care is delayed.

The significance of the report extends beyond a single patient. DISH has traditionally been considered more prevalent among Asian populations, and the authors argue this case demonstrates it can no longer be viewed as a disease exclusive to that region. Sudan has, to their knowledge, never before documented a case of DISH with cervical myelopathy, a gap that likely reflects limited diagnostic awareness and imaging access rather than true absence of disease. Because so many cases remain asymptomatic, the condition is easily overlooked until it produces devastating spinal cord injury, as this case demonstrates with a high risk of mortality. The authors call for epidemiological and clinical studies in Sudan to assess the prevalence, risk factors, and management outcomes of this underrecognized rheumatologic disorder.

For clinicians worldwide, the message is twofold. First, DISH deserves a place on the differential diagnosis of cervical myelopathy in elderly patients, particularly those with diabetes and obesity, even in regions where the disease has rarely been reported. Second, the case is a sobering illustration of how conflict and healthcare disruption convert manageable neurological disease into fatal outcome. A diagnosis that could have been treated with decompressive surgery became, through circumstance as much as biology, a death sentence. As the authors conclude, early recognition of DISH in settings where it is rarely reported is essential to improving clinical outcomes, and the first step is simply knowing to look for it.

Subject of Research: Diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis with cervical myelopathy

Article Title: Diffuse Idiopathic Skeletal Hyperostosis (DISH) With Cervical Myelopathy: A Case Report From Sudan

Article References: Abdalla, E., Alfatih, M., MohammedAhmed, M. A., Siddig, A., & Zeyada, H. (2026). Diffuse Idiopathic Skeletal Hyperostosis ( DISH ) With Cervical Myelopathy: A Case Report From Sudan. Clinical Case Reports, 14(10), Article e73643. https://doi.org/10.1002/ccr3.73643

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ccr3.73643

Keywords: DISH, cervical myelopathy, spinal ligament ossification, Forestier's disease, spinal canal stenosis, case report, Sudan, type 2 diabetes, spinal cord compression, rheumatology, ossification of posterior longitudinal ligament, elderly patients