The roots of "Western European societal evolution". A concept of Europe by Jenő Szűcs

Jenő Szűcs wrote his essay entitled Sketch on the three regions of Europe in the early 1980s in Hungary. During these years, a historically well-argued opinion emphasising a substantial difference between Central European and Eastern European societies was warmly received in various circles of the political opposition. In a wider European perspective Szűcs used the old “liberty topos” which claims that the history of Europe is no other than the fulfillment of liberty. In his Sketch, Szűcs does not only concentrate on questions concerning the Middle Ages in Western Europe. Yet it is this stream of thought which brought a new perspective to explaining European history. His picture of the Middle Ages represents well that there is a way to integrate all typical Western motifs of post-war self-definition into a single theory. Mainly, the “liberty motif”, as a sign of “Europeanism” – in the interpretation of Bibó’s concept, Anglo-saxon Marxists and Weber’s social theory –, developed from medieval concepts of state and society and from an analysis of economic and social structures. Szűcs’s historical aspect was a typical intellectual product of the 1980s: this was the time when a few Central European historians started to outline non-Marxist aspects of social theory and categories of modernisation theories, but concealing them with Marxist terminology

The visual world view of Zoltán Bachman

The paper has been presented at the ceremonial lecture held on 29 April 2016 for the nomination of the main lecture hall in the Science Building after the genius professor Zoltan Bachman belonged to the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Pecs

Heat Resistance of Human Pathogens in Sous-Vide Products Studied in Model Nutrition Media

Sous-vide (French for ʽunder vacuum’) is a professional cooking method, by which, under oxygen-free conditions and precise temperature control, not only cooking but preservation is achieved. During the process the food matrix is vacuum-packed and undergoes a mild heat treatment, thus achieving an enhanced nutrition value and a better organoleptic character. Due to the mild heat treatment (55 to 90 °C), the high water activity, and the slight acidity of raw materials, the microbial quality assurance is a great challenge even for professionals. The heat treatment does not assure the inactivation of pathogen spores. In our experiments we used Clostridium perfringens representing the spore-forming pathogens, and Salmonella Enteritidis as a the food-borne infection bacterium. Effects of various temperatures were measured in normal and sous-vide type vacuum packaging. Higher thermal death rate in vacuum packaging was demonstrated for Salmonella Enteritidis and Clostridium perfringens

An ALMA Survey of faint disks in the Chamaeleon I star-forming region: Why are some Class II disks so faint?

ALMA surveys of nearby star-forming regions have shown that the dust mass in the disk is correlated with the stellar mass, but with a large scatter. This scatter could indicate either different evolutionary paths of disks or different initial conditions within a single cluster. We present ALMA Cycle 3 follow-up observations for 14 Class II disks that were low S/N detections or non-detections in our Cycle 2 survey of the $\sim 2$ Myr-old Chamaeleon I star-forming region. With 5 times better sensitivity, we detect millimeter dust continuum emission from six more sources and increase the detection rate to 94\% (51/54) for Chamaeleon I disks around stars earlier than M3. The stellar-disk mass scaling relation reported in \citet{pascucci2016} is confirmed with these updated measurements. Faint outliers in the $F_{mm}$--$M_*$ plane include three non-detections (CHXR71, CHXR30A, and T54) with dust mass upper limits of 0.2 M$_\oplus$ and three very faint disks (CHXR20, ISO91, and T51) with dust masses $\sim 0.5$ M$_\oplus$. By investigating the SED morphology, accretion property and stellar multiplicity, we suggest for the three millimeter non-detections that tidal interaction by a close companion ($<$100 AU) and internal photoevaporation may play a role in hastening the overall disk evolution. The presence of a disk around only the secondary star in a binary system may explain the observed stellar SEDs and low disk masses for some systems.Comment: ApJ accepte

Az élelmi rostokkal kapcsolatos fogyasztói ismeret – Hazai kérdőíves felmérés eredményei

Absztrakt Bevezetés: Az élelmi rostok az egészséges és kiegyensúlyozott táplálkozás kulcselemei, amelyek rendszeres fogyasztása számos betegség kockázatát csökkentheti. Célkitűzés: Jelen munka célja a magyar fogyasztók élelmi rostokkal kapcsolatos ismeretének, vásárlási döntésben betöltött szerepének feltárása, valamint a jelenleg használt és a fogyasztást előremozdító lehetséges információforrások megismerése volt. Módszer: A kérdőíves megkérdezést 303 magyar felnőtt fogyasztó segítségével végezték. Eredmények: Az élelmi rostok forrásait tekintve a résztvevők bizonytalanok voltak, míg a rostfogyasztás egészségügyi hatásainak ismerete viszonylag alapos volt. Az internet jelentős információs forrásként jelent meg a témában, azonban az eredmények rámutatnak az iskolai oktatás fontosságára is. Az élelmi rostban gazdag élelmiszereket gyakrabban fogyasztók, a nők, valamint a 45 éven felüli résztvevők az élelmi rostokkal kapcsolatosan tudatos attitűdöt mutattak. Következtetések: A hazai fogyasztók kiegyensúlyozott táplálkozásának érdekében az élelmi rostokkal kapcsolatos hiteles és gyakorlati elemeket tartalmazó iránymutatás és oktatás elengedhetetlen, amelynek eredményeképpen a latens ismeret várhatóan a fogyasztók vásárlási döntéseiben tudatosan is meg fog jelenni. Orv. Hetil., 2016, 157(8), 302–309

Studies on the toxic interaction between monensin and tiamulin in rats: effects on P450 activities

Studies were carried out to investigate the effects of monensin and tiamulin, and the simultaneous administration of both compounds on microsomal enzymes in rats. In Phase I of the experiments the effects of monensin and tiamulin were studied separately (monensin 10, 30, and 50 mg/kg or tiamulin 40, 120, and 200 mg/kg body weight, respectively), while in Phase II the two compounds were administered simultaneously (monensin 10 mg/kg and tiamulin 40 mg/kg b.w., respectively). When monensin was administered by itself, it exerted no significant effect on microsomal liver enzymes. In a few cases, slight inhibition of certain enzyme activities was seen. Tiamulin provoked a dose-dependent hepatic enzyme induction. The combined administration of monensin and tiamulin at low doses (10 and 40 mg/kg, respectively) resulted in marked elevation of P450-related enzyme activities. The enzyme induction was more pronounced in females than in males. The results suggest that the simultaneous administration of tiamulin may influence the biotransformation of monensin, possibly increasing the amount of reactive metabolite(s) of the ionophore antibiotic

Postoperative interictal spikes during sleep contralateral to the operated side is associated with unfavourable surgical outcome in patients with preoperative bitemporal spikes

AbstractPurpose: To correlate the persistence of contralateral spikes during sleep after unilateral surgery with seizure outcome in a temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) population and to test the existing hypotheses about the origin of the contralateral spikes in temporal lobe epilepsy. Methods: In the 19 patients selected for this study unilateral temporal lobe surgery was performed. To investigate the course of bilateral interictal epileptiform discharges observed before surgery in awake or sleep over the temporal lobe contralateral to surgery, 24h mobile 12 channel EEG recording was performed at minimum two, in average 4.6 (2–10) years after the surgery. Results: The association of postoperative contralateral spikes and non-seizure free outcome was highly significant. The existence of unilateral pathology before surgery was highly predictive for good outcome and disappearance of contralateral spikes. The association between good seizure outcome, disappearance of contralateral spikes and the existence of unilateral pathology before surgery was also significant. Our data partially satisfies the expectations of both the “seizure induced” and mirror type secondary epileptogenesis hypotheses concerning origin of contralateral spikes, but were not completely congruent with either of them. Conclusions: Unfavourable surgical outcome in a temporal lobe epilepsy group with preoperative independent bilateral interictal spikes was associated with the persistence of postoperative contralateral spikes and lack of unilateral pathology. Compared with seizure outcome the presence/absence and distribution of postoperative interictal spikes in NREM sleep not entirely fit to the predictions of existing secondary epileptogenesis hypotheses

Disappearing scales in carps: Re-visiting Kirpichnikov's model on the genetics of scale pattern formation

The body of most fishes is fully covered by scales that typically form tight, partially overlapping rows. While some of the genes controlling the formation and growth of fish scales have been studied, very little is known about the genetic mechanisms regulating scale pattern formation. Although the existence of two genes with two pairs of alleles (S&s and N&n) regulating scale coverage in cyprinids has been predicted by Kirpichnikov and colleagues nearly eighty years ago, their identity was unknown until recently. In 2009, the ‘S’ gene was found to be a paralog of fibroblast growth factor receptor 1, fgfr1a1, while the second gene called ‘N’ has not yet been identified. We re-visited the original model of Kirpichnikov that proposed four major scale pattern types and observed a high degree of variation within the so-called scattered phenotype due to which this group was divided into two sub-types: classical mirror and irregular. We also analyzed the survival rates of offspring groups and found a distinct difference between Asian and European crosses. Whereas nude × nude crosses involving at least one parent of Asian origin or hybrid with Asian parent(s) showed the 25% early lethality predicted by Kirpichnikov (due to the lethality of the NN genotype), those with two Hungarian nude parents did not. We further extended Kirpichnikov's work by correlating changes in phenotype (scale-pattern) to the deformations of fins and losses of pharyngeal teeth. We observed phenotypic changes which were not restricted to nudes, as described by Kirpichnikov, but were also present in mirrors (and presumably in linears as well; not analyzed in detail here). We propose that the gradation of phenotypes observed within the scattered group is caused by a gradually decreasing level of signaling (a dose-dependent effect) probably due to a concerted action of multiple pathways involved in scale formation

Stellar-Mass-Dependent Disk Structure in Coeval Planet-Forming Disks

Previous studies suggest that the planet-forming disks around very-low-mass stars/brown dwarfs may be flatter than those around more massive stars, in contrast to model predictions of larger scale heights for gas-disks around lower-mass stars. We conducted a statistically robust study to determine whether there is evidence for stellar-mass-dependent disk structure in planet-forming disks. We find a statistically significant difference in the Spitzer/IRAC color distributions of disks around very-low-mass and low-mass stars all belonging to the same star-forming region, the Chamaeleon I star-forming region. We show that self consistently calculated disk models cannot fit the median spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of the two groups. These SEDs can be only explained by flatter disk models, consistent with the effect of dust settling in disks. We find that relative to the disk structure predicted for flared disks the required reduction in disk scale height is anti-correlated with the stellar mass, i.e. disks around lower-mass stars are flatter. Our results show that the initial and boundary conditions of planet formation are stellar-mass-dependent, an important finding that must be considered in planet formation models.Comment: Astrophysical Journal, in pres