Metabolic researches in Țurcana sheep breeding in different pastoral ecosystems

The health of Tsurcana sheep in different pastoral ecosystems is the result of a continuous adaptive metabolic process to macro and microclimate changes, depending on individual factors and breed characteristics (the rustic, indigenous breeds are better adapted). In this paper, the biological study material were two-year old Tsurcana sheep raised in Fagaraș, Rucar, Bacau (Comanești area); exclusively pasture fed; from each region and from each flock we collected blood samples from 5 sheep and we presented the average of the values obtained. We found: hypercholesterolemia in the Tsurcana sheep in all three regions (Fagaras and Rucar with similar values), hyperglobulinemia in Tsurcana sheep from Rucar; increased GOT activity in all the Tsurcana tested, most notably at Rucar; increased GPT activity, the highest value in those from Bacau; the increase in GGT activity, the highest value in Ţurcanele de Bacau. This increased plasma activity is due to hepatic lesions, hyperuraemia (the highest values being registered for the Rucar and Bacău Tsurcana); hypercreatinemia (the highest value in Bacau). A classification, depending on the affected organs: the liver is affected in sheep in Rucar and in Bacau; - the kidney and implicitly the nucleoproteic metabolism is more affected in Bacău and Rucăr sheep; the proteic metabolism in sheep in Rucar, where the highest globulin value were identified; on the other hand the increased globulins play a role in the host immunity and we must not forget that the research was carried out during lactation and the sheep from Rucar graze during summer at Lake Iezer at an altitude of over 1800 m; as for cholesterol, it is increased in sheep in all three regions; so lipid metabolism is disrupted, implicitly liver function. In conclusion: Fagaras Tsurcana have hypercholesterolemia, but excretion and epuration are less affected; correlating the obtained results, it can be argued that routine explorations can sometimes reveal unexpected and isolated transaminase elevations; these increases may be influenced by excess weight, adaptive liver reactions, cardio-circulatory failure etc.; many of these are not clinically investigated

Visions of Agency: Imagining Individual and Collective Action in Nineteenth-Century Romania

The present dissertation explores the contexts in which political agency was negotiated in nineteenth-century Romania (1830-1907), the concepts through which it was articulated, and the ways in which it was perceived as being distributed across time, class and state borders. Whatever may be understood by ‘agency’ is necessarily projected onto others as a way of making sense of their actions and justifying our power relationships with them, and situated in time, insofar as we tend to assume that projects in the present and the future are informed by past intentions and conditions. Guided by these assumptions, our research focuses on two key questions: how did historical actors ascribe agency to other actors and to themselves, and per which criteria? And, secondly, how did specific ways of thinking about agency in turn influence historical actors’ own perceptions of history and temporality? In order to make sense of this, we use “agency” – a socio-culturally mediated capacity to act,1 inherently temporally-situated – in order to historicise perspectives on human action, taking Romania as a case-study, covering a period from the preliminaries of establishing a nation-state and the abolition of serfdom, to the last great European peasant uprising. The project exhaustively examines more than a half-century of parliamentary debates, periodicals, literary texts and pamphlets in Romania and beyond. Surveying socio-political discourse in an age of rapid modernization, it highlights how often-surprising concepts articulated preconditions for – or loci of – agency, recovering the historically-situated meanings of terms as diverse as “feudalism”, “colonisation” and “proletariat”, how their supposed (in)applicability to Romania as a European periphery was negotiated, and how they became key concepts for thinking about both individual and collective action, its preconditions, and its limitations

EFFICIENT THEORETICAL SCREENING OF SOLID SORBENTS FOR CO2 CAPTURE APPLICATIONS

Carbon dioxide is a major combustion product of coal, which once released into the air can contribute to global climate change. Current CO2 capture technologies for power generation processes including amine solvents and CaO-based sorbent materials require very energy intensive regeneration steps which result in significantly decreased efficiency. Hence, there is a critical need for new materials that can capture and release CO2 reversibly with acceptable energy costs if CO2 is to be captured and sequestered economically. Inorganic sorbents are one such class of materials which typically capture CO2 through the reversible formation of carbonates. By combining thermodynamic database mining with first principles density functional theory and phonon lattice dynamics calculations, a theoretical screening methodology to identify the most promising CO2 sorbent candidates from the vast array of possible solid materials has been proposed and validated. The ab initio thermodynamic technique has the advantage of identifying thermodynamic properties of CO2 capture reactions without any experimental input beyond crystallographic structural information of the solid phases involved. For a given solid, the first step is to attempt to extract thermodynamic properties from thermodynamic databases and available literatures. If the thermodynamic properties of the compound of interest are unknown, an ab initio thermodynamic approach is used to calculate them. These properties expressed conveniently as chemical potentials and heat of reactions, either from databases or from calculations, are further used for computing the thermodynamic reaction equilibrium properties of the CO2 absorption/desorption cycle based on the chemical potential and heat of reaction. Only those solid materials for which lower capture energy costs are predicted at the desired process conditions are selected as CO2 sorbent candidates and further considered for experimental validations. Solid sorbents containing alkali and alkaline earth metals have been reported in several previous studies to be good candidates for CO2 sorbent applications due to their high CO2 absorption capacity at moderate working temperatures. In addition to introducing our selection process in this presentation, we will present our results for solid systems of alkali and alkaline metal oxides, hydroxides and carbonates/bicarbonates to validate our methodology. Additionally, applications of our computational method to mixed solid systems of Li2O and SiO2 with different mixing ratios, we showed that increasing the Li2O/SiO2 ratio in lithium silicates increases their corresponding turnover temperatures for CO2 capture reactions. These theoretical predictions are in good agreement with available experimental findings

Theoretical and computational studies of energetic salts

NRC publication: N