Mustafa(pbuh) Prize News

MSTF Media reports:

There have been times in our lives when we felt relaxed after drinking a mug of chamomile tea, or when that one nasty cold was soothed by a lemon tea. These moments of calm and contentment may have made us appreciate these natural products and think about other benefits we can receive from flowers, fruits, herbs and spices. We may have asked ourselves: Can natural remedies replace the conventional synthetic methods that we receive when we have an illness? Does the latter need to be altogether discarded or can both methods coexist and provide us with more effective medicine?
We asked for an expert opinion in the field, Muhammad Iqbal Choudhary to explain these issues. Choudhary enlightened us on nature’s healing legacy, his ongoing research on curing “neglected diseases,” and the importance of creating a “seamless healthcare system.” 
Plants: a Treasure House of Fascinating Molecules

MSTF Media reports:

A cell is the smallest structural and functional unit of living organisms. It consists of a membrane, genetic material, cytoplasm, and organelles. Cells can grow and divide through a process known as the cell cycle. This division varies depending on its purpose and the type of organism. The cell cycle is divided into several distinct stages, with specific proteins ensuring the accuracy of the division at the end of some phases. If cells continue to divide indiscriminately, beyond the natural cycle, they turn into cancerous cells, which may cluster together to form tumors.
 

Despite significant advancements, organ transplantation remains one of the most complex and challenging medical treatments, requiring deep knowledge of how the immune system interacts with transplanted organs. In general, by inhibiting T-cell activation pathways and reducing the production of harmful antibodies, transplant rejection can be prevented, and immunological tolerance can be strengthened. This approach is particularly important in critical stages of the immune response, including T-cell differentiation, function, and interactions with other immune cells.

According to Mohamed Sayegh, the most fundamental question in this field is: “What are the mechanisms of immunological tolerance, and how can we trick the immune system into accepting a foreign organ without rejection and without immunosuppression?”

If we take a fleeting glance around us, everything we see consists of matter that makes up the world. But is our universe, like our immediate surroundings, filled with visible matter and is it taken for granted? Let us step away from this visible matter for a moment and venture into a more enigmatic realm. Imagine leaving Earth behind and traveling so far that galaxies appear merely as tiny dots among countless others. From that vantage point, we can observe the entire observable universe within a single frame. But is everything before us truly composed of visible matter?

How would you feel if you were told that there are about 8 billion libraries, each with about 46 bookshelves and a total of 20,000 to 25,000 books? Each library is estimated to contain about 3 billion pages of paper.

Materials engineering, as one of the core engineering disciplines, today encompasses a wide range of materials, including metals, ceramics, polymers, semiconductors, magnetic materials, photonic materials, and biological materials

In the early days of software, the typical image that came to mind was of a programmer writing code alone in the confines of their room, isolated from other collaborators, striving to create something valuable. However, today, this image is far from reality, with hundreds of thousands of programmers, each with their own expertise, working collaboratively to develop software systems. This naturally raises a question:  Are other skills beyond coding needed to develop software?

Having put his idea of Mining Software Repositories into practice, Ahmed Hassan focused on building a scientific community around this area of study. His dedicated efforts in this regard seem to have been as successful as his ideas in the field of MSR.

With a microscopic view of our surroundings, we step into a realm of the unknown—a world where countless microorganisms thrive, each telling a different story of life’s complexity. Among them, viruses, despite their relatively simple structure, remain some of the most enigmatic entities in existence. These beings blur the line between life and non-life. Their survival depends entirely on their unfortunate hosts, and outside their target cells, they are nothing more than dormant genetic packets.