The enduring relevance of the Randle cycle
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How Shakespeare’s works have been reinterpreted, adapted and reshaped: a bibliometric review and trend analysis of Shakespeare studies from 2000 to 2023
Since transitioning into the post-theory era in 2000, Shakespearean studies have increasingly attracted interdisciplinary attention, engaging fields such as literature, performance studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies. Despite this broad interest, the discipline often lacks a cohesive framework to integrate these perspectives effectively. This study addresses this issue by applying bibliometric methods to data from the Web of Science Core Collection, using tools like VOSViewer and CiteSpace for analysis and visualization. By examining how Shakespeare’s works have been reinterpreted and adapted across diverse cultural and temporal contexts, the research employs the TCCM (Theory, Context, Characteristic, Methodology) framework to analyze thematic developments and interdisciplinary scope in Shakespeare studies from 2000 to 2023. Key findings reveal recurring research themes, including canonical text analysis, gender and performance, cross-cultural dissemination, adaptation, and the growing influence of digital humanities. The study identifies four distinct phases in the evolution of the field: the Initial Phase (2000–2005), focused on textual authenticity and literary value; the Transition Phase (2005–2010), marked by the integration of cultural studies and gender theory; the Mature Phase (2010–2019), exploring societal issues such as ethics and environmental humanities; and the Post-Pandemic Phase (2019–2023), emphasizing globalization and environmental concerns. These phases reflect shifts in academic priorities, methodologies, and interdisciplinary approaches, demonstrating the field’s responsiveness to global and technological developments. This study highlights the importance of deepening interdisciplinary integration and adopting emerging frameworks, such as new materialism, while combining distant and close reading techniques. These approaches offer a nuanced understanding of Shakespeare’s works, showcasing their enduring relevance and cultural transformation in a globalized and rapidly evolving academic landscape.
Multimodal insights: enhancing cultural promotion through analysis of Saudi Arabian audiovisual productions
This research explores the application of Dicerto’s (2018) multimodal pragmatic model in analyzing Arabic audiovisual productions for translation purposes, focusing on enhancing cultural promotion. Employing a qualitative descriptive analysis approach, the study examines samples from Saudi productions that promote tourism, mainly focusing on Saudi coffee and its cultural traditions to enlighten foreign visitors about Saudi culture. The analysis reveals that Dicerto’s model provides a clear framework for achieving semantic fidelity in translation, ensuring that the translated text closely resembles its original in interpretative richness. Central to this framework is the principle of optimal relevance, wherein the sender intends the message to be maximally pertinent to the audience, thereby justifying the recipient’s cognitive effort in processing it and facilitating access to the sender’s intentions. This research sheds light on the effectiveness of applying multimodal analysis models in cultural promotion efforts through audiovisual productions, particularly in Saudi Arabian tourism promotion.
Universal relations and bounds for fluctuations in quasistatic small heat engines
The efficiency of any heat engine, defined as the ratio of average work output to heat input, is bounded by Carnot’s celebrated result. However, this measure is insufficient to characterize the properties of miniaturized heat engines carrying non-negligible fluctuations, and a study of higher-order statistics of their energy exchanges is required. Here, we generalize Carnot’s result for reversible cycles to arbitrary order moment of the work and heat fluctuations. Our results show that, in the quasistatic limit, higher-order statistics of a small engine’s energetics depend solely on the ratio between the temperatures of the thermal baths. We further prove that our result for the second moment gives universal bounds for the ratio between the variances of work and heat for quasistatic cycles. We test this theory with our previous experimental results of a Brownian Carnot engine and observe the consistency between them, even beyond the quasistatic regime. Our results can be exploited in the design of thermal nanomachines to reduce their fluctuations of work output without marginalizing its average value and efficiency.
Metabolic crosstalk between the mitochondrion and the nucleus is essential for Toxoplasma gondii infection
Toxoplasma gondii, an intracellular pathogenic protist with a remarkable ability to infect a wide range of host cells, displays an equally exceptional design of its carbon metabolism. There are, however, critical gaps in our understanding of the metabolic network in T. gondii. We characterized the mito-nuclear metabolism and organelle coupling during its acute infection (lytic cycle). The major enzymes of the TCA cycle, i.e., citrate synthase (CS1), succinyl-CoA synthase alpha subunit (SCSα), succinate dehydrogenase (SDHA) and FAD malate dehydrogenase (MDH-FAD) located in the parasite mitochondrion support its asexual reproduction but are not needed for its survival. The SCSα and SDHA mutants are nearly avirulent in a mouse model, and they can protect the host against a lethal challenge infection. Genetic deletion of MDH-FAD dysregulated glucose-derived carbon flux, leading to a collapse of the mitochondrial membrane potential. The parasite also harbors a cytosolic isoform of MDH and a nuclear malic enzyme (ME) contributing to malate oxidation; however, only the latter is essential for the lytic cycle. Expression of ME in the nucleus is crucial for the parasite development. Besides, conditional knockdown of ME impairs the histone acetylation and disrupts the expression of several genes in tachyzoites. Our work discloses novel network design features of T. gondii and highlights the therapeutic and vaccination potential of the parasite metabolism.
Efficiently preparing chiral states via fermionic cooling on bosonic quantum hardware
Simulating many-body systems is one of the most promising applications of near-term quantum computers. An important open question is how to efficiently prepare the ground states of arbitrary fermionic Hamiltonians, especially those with nontrivial topology. Here, we propose an efficient protocol for preparing low-energy states of fermionic Hamiltonians on a noisy bosonic quantum simulator by adiabatic cooling using a simulated bath. We arrange the couplings such that the simulated system and bath together obtain a local fermionic description in which fermionic excitations can be extracted individually, via coherent hopping to the bath, rather than in pairs as would otherwise be required by fermion parity conservation. This approach thus achieves a linear (rather than quadratic) scaling of the cooling rate vs. excitation density at low densities. We show that certain topological phases such as the chiral (non-Abelian) phase of the Kitaev honeycomb model can be prepared efficiently using our protocol. Our protocol performs favorably in the presence of noise, making it suitable for execution on near-term quantum devices.
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