University of Central Oklahoma

This research note explores rural crime investigations through an ethnographic study of the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry (ODAFF) Special Investigations Unit. While rural and urban law enforcement often address similar crime types, rural areas present unique challenges such as livestock theft, timber theft, and heavy equipment theft, necessitating substantive knowledge and technical skills. This study details the researchers' journey from a drug-focused project to a broader examination of rural policing, highlighting the critical role of ODAFF agents in assisting local law enforcement. Through in-depth interviews, ride-alongs, and observational data from a training class, the research examines the types of crimes ODAFF investigates and the significance of their work. The findings align with international research emphasizing the need for unique responses to rural crime and underscore the importance of ethnographic methods in understanding rural cultures and policing. This research reveals that ODAFF agents, with their insider knowledge and specialized training, play an integral role in addressing rural crime, emphasizing the necessity of tailored law enforcement approaches in geographically distinct areas.

Using sintered neodymium–iron–boron (NdFeB) cube magnets and additively manufactured polylactic acid (PLA) and steel frames, we investigate hybrid manufacturing approaches for enhancing magnetic fields in cylindrical Halbach arrays while reducing reliance on critical rare-earth materials. Nested Halbach geometries with eight discrete dipolar segments were selected to balance magnetic performance with construction simplicity. The inner Halbach ring consisted of eight N48 NdFeB cube magnets, while the outer ring employed either additional NdFeB cubes or hybrid configurations incorporating additively manufactured steel elements. Experimentally, introducing a second Halbach ring of eight NdFeB cubes increased the lateral magnetic field by only ∼5%, indicating strong geometric and finite-length limitations in discretized arrays. In contrast, the axial magnetic field increased by ∼27% when 16 soft-magnetic steel cubes were incorporated into the outer ring. Notably, the lateral field enhancement achieved using eight NdFeB cubes combined with 16 steel cubes was comparable to that obtained using a full outer ring of 24 NdFeB magnets, despite substantially reduced permanent-magnet content. Ansys Maxwell Multiphysics simulations show that finite array thickness, magnet segmentation, alignment tolerances, and contour-driven demagnetization effects associated with discrete magnet geometry and array boundaries strongly suppress idealized field enhancements. These results demonstrate the potential of hybrid manufacturing to achieve competitive magnetic performance using lightweight, application-specific nested Halbach array architectures while reducing the criticality of high-grade permanent magnet materials.

This study examined how Protestant theological orientation and marginalized social identity influence attitudes toward Christian denominations and religion more broadly. We tried to test whether greater theological openness predicts more affirming attitudes and whether marginalized identity moderates this relationship. A total of 479 adults completed measures of Protestant Theological Orientation (PTS), Attitudes Toward Denominations (ATD), Attitudes Toward Religion (ATR), Defensive Theology (DTS), and Attachment to God (AGI). Regression and MANOVA analyses tested hypotheses regarding the predictive roles of theology and marginalization (non-cisgender and/or non-heterosexual status). Contrary to expectations, higher biblical literalism (higher PTS scores) predicted stronger affirming attitudes toward both denominations and religion overall. Marginalized participants expressed significantly lower ATD scores but did not differ in ATR. Interaction analyses revealed that marginalized status moderated the relationship between theology and denominational attitudes, suggesting that literalism was especially affirming for marginalized participants. Marginalized individuals also reported higher defensive theology and greater attachment anxiety toward God. Findings challenge assumptions that theological openness fosters affirmation, instead showing that biblical literalism predicts more positive denominational and religious attitudes, particularly among marginalized groups. Results show the complex interplay of theology, social identity, and spiritual resilience, with implications for counseling, pastoral care, and interfaith engagement.

Robotic aerial vehicles (RAVs), particularly drones, are crucial in civil and military sectors. However, researchers have found that adversaries can inject noise into sensor measurements and cause physical impacts on the RAVs like crashes. Although identifying such signal injection attacks is essential to evaluate and improve the robustness of an RAV, it is challenging to discover them since their impact depends on the RAV’s physical states and the search space of noise signals and physical states is vast due to its dynamic nature.This paper proposes IMUFUZZER, a feedback-driven fuzzing framework, to automatically test an RAVs system and discover signal injection attacks. IMUFUZZER generates realistic noise signals for various inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors, and monitors their impact on RAV control to detect mission failures, leveraging a high-fidelity RAV simulator. To find the physical states that attacks depend on, IMUFUZZER generates various mission paths that the RAV will fly through. We develop a novel feedback mechanism to quantify the resilience of the RAV against attacks and efficiently guide the fuzzing process to find signal injection attacks. Using IMUFUZZER, we have discovered 23 successful signal injection attacks on popular RAV control software (ArduPilot). We evaluate the correctness and effectiveness of our feedback-based sensor fuzzing and demonstrate the feasibility of the discovered attacks through physical experiments.

We sequenced the genome, transcriptome, and bacterial metagenome of Psammoneis japonica, a benthic, chain‐forming, and araphid marine diatom. This combination of traits fills several gaps in genome sequencing coverage across diatoms. The nuclear genome (QPGO00000000) is an estimated 91.4 Mb in length, with 11,047 genes that comprise 18% of the total genome. Repetitive elements account for 33% of the genome, and other noncoding sequences comprise the remaining 49% of the genome. A global analysis of diatom genomes showed that repetitive elements are the principal driver of genome size variation in diatoms. Four complete genomes of Planctomycetota, ɑ‐proteobacteria, and Bacteroidota were also recovered, and each had only moderate similarity to previously sequenced bacterial genomes. This finding supports the idea that bacterial species richness in the phycosphere is under‐described and far exceeds the number of diatom host species, which themselves number in the tens to hundreds of thousands of species.

The rapid advancement of generative AI has enabled the creation of highly realistic forged facial images, posing significant threats to AI security, digital media integrity, and public trust. Face forgery techniques-ranging from face swapping and attribute editing to powerful diffusion-based image synthesis-are increasingly being used for malicious purposes such as misinformation, identity fraud, and defamation. This growing challenge underscores the urgent need for robust and generalizable face forgery detection methods as a critical component of AI security infrastructure. In this work, we propose a novel dual-branch convolutional neural network for face forgery detection that leverages complementary cues from both spatial and frequency domains. The RGB branch captures semantic information, while the frequency branch focuses on high-frequency artifacts that are difficult for generative models to suppress. A channel attention module is introduced to adaptively fuse these heterogeneous features, highlighting the most informative channels for forgery discrimination. To guide the network's learning process, we design a unified loss function-FSC Loss-that combines focal loss, supervised contrastive loss, and a frequency center margin loss to enhance class separability and robustness. We evaluate our model on the DiFF benchmark, which includes forged images generated from four representative methods: text-to-image, image-to-image, face swap, and face edit. Our method achieves strong performance across all categories and outperforms average human accuracy. These results demonstrate the model's effectiveness and its potential contribution to safeguarding AI ecosystems against visual forgery attacks.

This study aims to develop magnetically labeled iPSC-derived extracellular vesicles (magneto-EVs) for MRI/MPI and myocardial repair in a theranostic manner. Using optimized electroporation and purification protocols, we prepared magneto-EVs with high SuperSPIO20 loading efficiency (1.77 ng Fe/10? EVs) and well-preserved therapeutic effects. In vitro MPI results reveal that the detectability of magneto-EVs is ~1 × 109 EVs/mL. In vivo MPI shows that MPI can detect magneto-iPSC-EVs injected intramyocardially in mouse hearts for up to 7 days following myocardial infarction. MPI quantification showed that 32% of injected EVs remained in the heart after 24 hours, with a further ~50% decrease by day 7, indicating progressive clearance or biodegradation of magneto-EVs from the injected site. Despite this low retention and rapid clearance, magneto-EVs led to significant improvement in left ventricular ejection fraction (37.3% increase) and scar formation (61.0% reduction). This theranostic EV imaging platform enables quantitative MPI monitoring of EV delivery and predicting therapeutic outcomes.

ABSTRACTStem cell‐derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) offer a promising cell‐free approach for cardiovascular regenerative medicine. In this study, we developed magnetically labelled induced pluripotent stem cell‐derived EVs (magneto‐iPSC‐EVs) encapsulated with superparamagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) nanoparticles for image‐guided regenerative treatment of myocardial infarction, in which EVs that can be detected by both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic particle imaging (MPI). iPSC‐EVs were isolated, characterized per MISEV2023 guidelines, and loaded with SuperSPIO20 nanoparticles using optimized electroporation conditions (300 V, 2 × 10 ms pulses), achieving a high loading efficiency of 1.77 ng Fe/106 EVs. In vitro results show that magneto‐iPSC‐EVs can be sensitively detected by MPI and MRI, with a detectability of approximately 107 EVs. In a mouse myocardial ischemia‐reperfusion model, intramyocardially injected magneto‐iPSC‐EVs (2 × 109) were imaged non‐invasively by in vivo MPI for 7 days and ex vivo MRI, with the presence of magneto‐iPSC‐EVs confirmed by Prussian blue staining. Therapeutically, both native and magneto‐ iPSC‐EVs significantly improved cardiac function, with a 37.3% increase in left ventricular ejection fraction and 61.0% reduction in scar size. This study highlights the potential of magneto‐iPSC‐EVs as a cell‐free approach for cardiovascular regenerative medicine, offering both non‐invasive imaging capabilities and therapeutic benefits for myocardial repair.