Spaces for Deposition of Offerings in Early Byzantine Churches: Possible Sacristies at Golemo Gradište, Konjuh

This paper is primarily a presentation of two recently excavated rooms in the 6th c. Episcopal Basili-ca at the site of Golemo Gradište, village of Konjuh. The location and furnishings of the spaces raise the possibility that they were used for the deposition of offerings, such as bread and wine for the Eucharist, by members of the congregation as they entered the church. Gifts of bread and wine immediately move the discussion into issues of liturgy. In order to set the church and these specific rooms in context and to avoid entanglement in difficult liturgical issues, some background will be provided and some assumptions stated

Golemo Gradište at Konjuh: An Unidentified Late Antique City and Its Churches

This article provides an overview of the city as we saw it in 2008. It gives a detailed discussion of the basilica found that year, with a postscript on discoveries in 2009

The Episcopal Basilica, the Via Sacra, and the Semicircular Court at Stobi, R. Macedonia

Stobi was the largest and best known city in northern Macedonia in Late Antiquity. Located at the confluence of the Erigon (modern Crna) and Axios (modern Vardar) rivers, now in the Republic of Macedonia, the city became the capital of the province of Macedonia Secunda in the second half of the 5th century. Bishop Budios from Stobi participated in the Council of Nicaea in 325, and several later bishops of the city are known. According to an inscription, Bishop Philip was responsible for the construction of his episcopal church. The Episcopal Basilica at Stobi is the outstanding Early Byzantine church known in the province of Macedonia Secunda, in terms of size, associated buildings, complexity of plan, unusual features, architectural sculpture, and mosaic and painted decoration. Four successive phases of the basilica functioned from the late 4th century or ca. 400 AD until the late 6th century when the city was abandoned. More specifically, the first phase of the Early Church, constructed probably ca. 400 AD, was renovated and enlarged into its second phase, most likely between 425 and 450, although no definite date can be assigned. During the third quarter of the 5th century the Early Church was deliberately and carefully dismantled. The original construction of the Basilica on the Terrace, socalled because it stood on an artificial terrace ca. 4 m above the floor level of the Early Church, is dated on the basis of ceramic evidence to the last quarter of the 5th century;4 a major rebuilding is less precisely dated to the first half of the 6th century, most probably to the 520s or 530s

The Rock-Cut Room on the Acropolis at Golemo Gradište, Konjuh: Date and Purpose

The anonymous city at the site of Golemo Gradište at the village of Konjuh, R. Macedonia, belongs to the period of Late Antiquity; the evidence indicates that it was founded in the 5th century. The lower town on the northern terrace was reconstructed, probably during the second quarter of the 6th century, but the inhabitants abandoned it, for the most part, later in that century and fled for refuge to the acropolis, where a settlement continued to exist into the early 7th century. Earlier material, beginning with the Late Neolithic and continuing sporadically through Bronze Age to Hellenistic, has been documented at the site; a Roman settlement may have been located nearby but not at Golemo Gradište itself, and there is evidence for Byzantine and Turkish occupation. Despite this overall understanding of the chronology of occupation at the site, one of its most attractive features has remained a mystery, uncertain in date and purpose. [excerpt

Isospectral potentials and conformally equivalent isospectral metrics on spheres, balls and Lie groups

We construct pairs of conformally equivalent isospectral Riemannian metrics $\phi_1 g$ and $\phi_2 g$ on spheres $S^n$ and balls $B^{n+1}$ for certain dimensions $n$, the smallest of which is $n=7$, and on certain compact simple Lie groups. In the case of Lie groups, the metric $g$ is left-invariant. In the case of spheres and balls, the metric $g$ is not the standard metric but may be chosen arbitrarily close to the standard one. For the same manifolds $(M,g)$ we also show that the functions $\phi_1$ and $\phi_2$ are isospectral potentials for the Schr\"odinger operator $\hbar^2\Delta +\phi$. To our knowledge, these are the first examples of isospectral potentials and of isospectral conformally equivalent metrics on simply connected closed manifolds.Comment: 34 pages, AMS-TeX; revised subsection 5.

Late Antique Residences at Golemo Gradište, Konjuh, R. Macedonia

The systematic excavations that began at Golemo Gradište in 2000 were the first major, legal investigations on the site itself. Through survey of the site, researchers had reached a number of conclusions and hypotheses about lines of fortification walls, location of gates, and roads associated with the site. But almost nothing was known about the buildings or the internal arrangement of the site, and there were questions about dating. Therefore, both on the acropolis (2000-2004) and on the northern terrace (2005-present), the first step was to set trenches in several places, to investigate the architecture and the urban plan and to establish a chronology of the settlement. Given the discoveries in those initial trenches, excavation was later focused on a few areas. One consequence of this approach was limited excavation in several areas that were probably residential (or a combination of residential with industrial or commercial), but only a few examples of extensively investigated residential complexes. [excerpt

Novel translational approaches to the search for precision therapies for acute respiratory distress syndrome.

In the 50 years since acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was first described, substantial progress has been made in identifying the risk factors for and the pathogenic contributors to the syndrome and in characterising the protein expression patterns in plasma and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from patients with ARDS. Despite this effort, however, pharmacological options for ARDS remain scarce. Frequently cited reasons for this absence of specific drug therapies include the heterogeneity of patients with ARDS, the potential for a differential response to drugs, and the possibility that the wrong targets have been studied. Advances in applied biomolecular technology and bioinformatics have enabled breakthroughs for other complex traits, such as cardiovascular disease or asthma, particularly when a precision medicine paradigm, wherein a biomarker or gene expression pattern indicates a patient's likelihood of responding to a treatment, has been pursued. In this Review, we consider the biological and analytical techniques that could facilitate a precision medicine approach for ARDS