Prolegomena to research on the "Brest catechism" in the light of the origins of the Brest printing press

The authors of the article attempt to present current research into the Brest Catechism, the sixteenth-century text reprinted in 1908 and edited by Franciszek Pułaski as part of the Collectanea Series by the Krasiński Estate Library. It was prefaced by Pułaski, and reviewed by Aleksander Woyde and Aleksander Brückner. The article presents background to the publication of the Catechism, i.e. the activity of Mikołaj "the Black" Radziwiłł, specifically setting up the printing house in Brest in 1553 and engaging Bernard Wojewódka in it. The authors also attempt to establish the reasons for the Catechism’s dual composition

Characterizing the Response Space of Questions: data and theory

The main aim of this paper is to provide a characterization of the response space for questions using a taxonomy grounded in a dialogical formal semantics. As a starting point we take the typology for responses in the form of questions provided in \cite{lupginz-jlm}. This work develops a wide coverage taxonomy for question/question sequences observable in corpora including the BNC, CHILDES, and BEE, as well as formal modeling of all the postulated classes. Our aim is to extend this work to cover \emph{all} responses to questions. We present the extended typology of responses to questions based on a corpus studies of BNC, BEE, Maptask and CornellMovie with include 506, 262, 467, and 678 question/response pairs respectively. We compare the data for English with data from Polish using the Spokes corpus (694 question/response pairs). We discuss annotation reliability and disagreement analysis. We sketch how each class can be formalized using a dialogical semantics appropriate for dialogue management

Quality control of mint species based on UV-VIS and FTIR spectral data supported by chemometric tools

Mints are valued for their specific essential oil used in food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry. Chemical compounds differing between species, cause changes in medicinal/pharmacological properties, antioxidant activities or smell sensations. For this reason fast procedure for quality control of at least two most popular mint species, peppermint and spearmint, is the issue at hand. UV-VIS spectrophotometry and FTIR-ATR spectroscopy were used for recording the spectral fingerprints of a collection of more than 20 mint varieties harvested in three periods. Two-step chemometric approach for mints quality control involved SIMCA (Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy) to filter out species other than peppermint and spearmint. The samples suspected to be either peppermint or spearmint underwent final discrimination using adequate discrimination tools PLS-DA (Partial Least Squares-Discriminant Analysis) or SVM (Support Vector Machines). The model performance ranged between 60 and 80% depending on spectroscopic data used for model training and the harvest season

Perinatal manifestations of congenital disorders of glycosylation—A clue to early diagnosis

N-glycosylation defects—isolated or mixed with other glycosylation defects—are the most frequent congenital disorders of glycosylation and present mostly in childhood, with a specific combination of non-specific phenotypic features. The diagnosis, however, is often delayed. The aim of this study is to describe the perinatal phenotype of congenital disorders of N-glycosylation. We present an analysis of perinatal symptoms in a group of 24 one-center Polish patients with N-glycosylation defects—isolated or mixed. The paper expands the perinatal phenotype of CDGs and shows that some distinctive combinations of symptoms present in the perinatal period should raise a suspicion of CDGs in a differential diagnosis

Blood-stage antiplasmodial activity and oocyst formation-blockage of metallo copper-cinchonine complex

In the fight against malaria, the key is early treatment with antimalarial chemotherapy, such as artemisinin-based combination treatments (ACTs). However, Plasmodium has acquired multidrug resistance, including the emergence of P. falciparum strains with resistance to ACT. The development of novel antimalarial molecules, that are capable of interfering in the asexual and sexual blood stages, is important to slow down the transmission in endemic areas. In this work, we studied the ability of the mettalo copper-cinchonine complex to interfere in the sexual and asexual stages of Plasmodium. The tested compound in the in vitro assay was a cinchonine derivative, named CinCu (Bis[Cinchoninium Tetrachlorocuprate(II)]trihydrate). Its biological functions were assessed by antiplasmodial activity in vitro against chloroquine-resistant P. falciparum W2 strain. The mice model of P. berghei ANKA infection was used to analyze the antimalarial activity of CinCu and chloroquine and their acute toxicity. The oocyst formation-blocking assay was performed by experimental infection of Anopheles aquasalis with P. vivax infected blood, which was treated with different concentrations of CinCu, cinchonine, and primaquine. We found that CinCu was able to suppress as high as 81.58% of parasitemia in vitro, being considered a molecule with high antiplasmodial activity and low toxicity. The in vivo analysis showed that CinCu suppressed parasitemia at 34% up to 87.19%, being a partially active molecule against the blood-stage forms of P. berghei ANKA, without inducing severe clinical signs in the treated groups. The transmission-blocking assay revealed that both cinchonine and primaquine were able to reduce the infection intensity of P. vivax in A. aquasalis, leading to a decrease in the number of oocysts recovered from the mosquitoes’ midgut. Regarding the effect of CinCu, the copper-complex was not able to induce inhibition of P. vivax infection; however, it was able to induce an important reduction in the intensity of oocyst formation by about 2.4 times. It is plausible that the metallo-compound also be able to interfere with the differentiation of parasite stages and/or ookinete-secreted chitinase into the peritrophic matrix of mosquitoes, promoting a reduction in the number of oocysts formed. Taken together, the results suggest that this compound is promising as a prototype for the development of new antimalarial drugs. Furthermore, our study can draw a new pathway for repositioning already-known antimalarial drugs by editing their chemical structure to improve the antimalarial activity against the asexual and sexual stages of the parasite

Diagnostics and treatment of differentiated thyroid carcinoma in children — Guidelines of Polish National Societies

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