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Though rare, statins can produce serious adverse effects with clinical implications that urge prompt intervention. However, in high-risk patients that require intense hypolipemiant treatment, such situations can be challenging and require complimentary therapies. We report the case of a 82-year-old hypertensive female patient admitted for diffuse myalgia, mainly in the lower limbs, fatigue and shortness of breath. The patient is known with a recent myocardial infarction (MI) treated by primary stent implantation. The electrocardiogram and transthoracic echocardiography confirmed the recent MI, with non-dilated left ventricle mildly reduced ejection fraction. Initial laboratory studies revealed elevated NT-proBNP, moderate renal impairment and increased serum levels of creatine kinase (CK), CK-MB fraction and transaminases. After stopping statin and receiving supportive treatment, the patient's paraclinical test results and symptoms improved: CK levels and transaminase dropped significantly and both myalgia and general fatigue resolved mostly within 4 days. PCSK9 inhibitor has been introduced with favourable results at follow-ups. Even though statins are effective and safe, they may still generate potential dangerous adverse effects in rare cases. Statin dose adjustment or replacement and adding other lipid lowering therapies represent current therapeutical options, especially in high-risk populations.

Left ventricular thrombosis (LVT) is one of the most severe complications of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). LVT is commonly associated with an increased risk of cerebral or systemic embolization, which furthermore increases the morbidity and mortality of these patients. Management of LVT implies the administration of anticoagulants to achieve thrombus resolution and reduce the embolic risk. However, in the setting of an AMI, anticoagulants are added to already existing antiplatelet therapy, which increases the bleeding risk for this category of patients. Vitamin K antagonist (VKA) represents the main guideline recommendation for anticoagulation, but its multiple interactions are associated with an increased number of patients who are outside the therapeutic range and low compliance. Early studies that evaluate direct oral anticoagulants (DOAC) as an alternative for VKA show promising results, with reduced strokes and bleeding rates and faster thrombus resolution. Thus, in the near future, DOAC may represent a therapeutic option for treating LVT, but larger studies are needed to validate this approach.

Plants of the Dahlia genus are particularly valued for their wide variety of shapes and colors both as cultivated plants and as cut flowers thus increasing the interest for the introduction in the culture of cultivars with great decorative value and great resistance as cut flowers. The work presents anatomical aspects, but also particularities regarding the life span of cut flowers in preservation solutions for the cultivars 'Topmix Red', 'Hy Pimento', 'Babylon Red', 'Marble Ball' and 'Thomas Edison'. The objective of this study was to analyze dahlia varieties both from the anatomical point of view and the preservation of cut flowers in vases using different preservation solutions to establish a correlation between the diameter of xylem vessels and cut flower life. The diameter of the xylem vessels does not seem to influence the life span of the cut flowers, regardless of the solution used in the conditions of this experiment. The Quick dip and eZDose conservation solution increased the lifespan of the varieties studied compared to the other conservation solutions used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work reports the synthesis of efficient Ti–Au/zeolite Y photocatalysts by different processing of aluminosilicate gel and studies the effect of titania content on the structural, morphological, textural, and optical properties of the materials. The best characteristics of zeolite Y were obtained by aging the synthesis gel in static conditions and mixing the precursors under magnetic stirring. Titania (5, 10, 20%) and gold (1%) species were incorporated in zeolite Y support by the post-synthesis method. The samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction, N2-physisorption, SEM, Raman, UV–Vis and photoluminescence spectroscopy, XPS, H2-TPR, and CO2-TPD. The photocatalyst with the lowest TiO2 loading shows only metallic Au on the outermost surface layer, while a higher content favors the formation of additional species such as: cluster type Au, Au1+, and Au3+. A high TiO2 content contributes to increasing the lifetime of photogenerated charge careers, and the adsorption capacity of the pollutant. Therefore, an increase in the photocatalytic performances (evaluated in degradation of amoxicillin in water under UV and visible light) was evidenced with the titania content. The effect is more significant in visible light due to the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) effect of gold interacting with the supported titania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canonical texts should be retranslated periodically, to avoid the obsolescence that fatally begins to affect not only the interpretations of previous translators but also their linguistic choices. A recent project conducted in Romania has underlined the importance of retranslating Shakespearean works into Romanian especially through a polemical 'conversation' with revered predecessors. The poetics of the new edition of retranslations foregrounds the performative dimension of Shakespearean texts and aims to reconnect the public of the present to the world of the great writer's texts. These retranslations have already been used for Romanian performances and are now appreciated for their greater semantic and pragmatic adequacy. This paper presents the basic principles and methods adopted by the translators of the new edition and further explores the vistas that it opens for future Romanian retranslations of dramatic texts written not only by Shakespeare but also by some of his contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tin-doped TiO2 powders obtained by sol-gel and microwave-assisted sol-gel methods were investigated. The synthesis took place in a basic medium (pH 10, ammonium hydroxide, 25%) starting from tetrabutyl orthotitanate in its parental alcohol. In the case of the dopant, Tin(II) 2-ethylhexanoate as SnO2 precursor was used in the amount of 1, 2, or 4 mol % SnO2. Based on thermal analysis data, the powders were thermally treated in air, at 500 °C. The comparative investigation of the structure and morphology of the nanopowders annealed at 500 °C was performed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy with selected area electron diffraction (HRTEM/SAED), scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) coupled with EDX mapping, Fourier transmission infrared (FTIR), UV–Vis, Raman and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and X-ray florescence spectroscopy (XRF). The obtained materials were tested for the photocatalytic removal of methyl orange dye from aqueous solutions. High degradation efficiencies (around 90%) were obtained by Sn doping after 3 h of UV light irradiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human life as represented in literature is intricately connected with time and space. In Bakhtin’s words, this is equal to saying that the human perception and construction of experience have an essential chronotopic pattern. This is one of the basic structural principles adopted by a modernist writer as Virginia Woolf in her novels. Caught between past, present and future, between objective time and the subjective time of Bergsonian duration, Woolf’s protagonists enact metaphorical plunges into their inner infernos through flashbacks triggered by the spatio-temporal coordinates that define their diegetic positions. This paper aims to explore Woolf’s revisionary mode which projects the characters’ struggles on a background saturated with mythological allusions that provide a frame from within which restrictive traditional models and social conventions are subtly contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the results of the morphological characteristics of Dahlia leaves (leaves area, the perimeter, the length of the leaves, width of leaf), physiological processes (photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration) and chlorophyll content determined at 5 Dahlia cultivars 'Topmix Red', 'Hy Pimento', 'Babylon Red', 'Marble Ball' and 'Thomas Edison'. The average leaf area has varied from 5.35 cm² ('Topmix Red') to 68.41 cm2 ('Babylon Red'). As for the perimeter, 'Babylon Red' had the highest value (67.49 cm) and 'Topmix Red' had the lowest value (9.72 cm). The length of the leaves was between 14.19 cm for 'Babylon Red' and 4.43 cm for 'Topmix Red'. The width of the leaves was between 10,18 cm for 'Babylon Red' variant and 2.26 cm for 'Topmix Red'.The intensity of photosynthesis varied between 12.85 μmol CO2 m-2s-1 for 'Babylon Red' and 15.24 μmol CO2 m-2s-1 for 'Topmix Red', intensity of transpiration 4.69 mmol H2O m-2s-1 for 'Hy Pimento' and 6.17 mmol H2O m-2s-1 for 'Thomas Edison', intensity respiration 7.46 μmol CO2 m-2s-1 for 'Hy Pimento' and 13.43 μmol CO2 m-2s-1 to 'Marble Ball'. The total chlorophyll content was higher in the case of 'Marble Ball', at a value of 163.90 mg/100g, and the smallest quantity was recorded for the 'Babylon Red' at the value of 102.15 mg/100g. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brought up in the 'tranquilized' 1950s and educated by fierce adepts of New Critical dogmas, the poets who formed what was subsequently called the American Confessional school came to revolutionize Western poetry in the 1960s and 1970s by openly exploring in their texts topics previously considered unapproachable (mental breakdown, sex, addiction, abortion, family dysfunctions). The type of art they practised opened new vistas for poetry and, at the same time, provided interesting material for psychiatric studies exploring the intriguing connection between mental illness and artistic creativity. Anne Sexton's case, like that of Sylvia Plath with whom she is often compared, offers rich ground for an exploration of this kind. Discovering her poetic gift during the course of her psychotherapy, she continued to write until her suicide in 1974. Poetry therapy led her to highly appreciated literary achievements, even though it could not save her from her final tragic demise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For environmental applications, nanosized TiO2-based materials are known as the most important photocatalyst and are intensively studied for their advantages such as their higher activity, lower price, and chemical and photoresist properties. Zn or Cu doped TiO2 nanoparticles with anatase crystalline structure were synthesized by sol−gel process. Titanium (IV) butoxide was used as a TiO2 precursor, with parental alcohol as a solvent, and a hydrolysing agent (ammonia-containing water) was added to obtain a solution with pH 10. The gels were characterized by TG/DTA analysis, SEM, and XPS. Based on TG/DTA results, the temperature of 500 °C was chosen for processing the powders in air. The structure of the samples thermally treated at 500 °C was analysed by XRD and the patterns show crystallization in a single phase of TiO2 (anatase). The surface of the samples and the oxidation states was investigated by XPS, confirming the presence of Ti, O, Zn and Cu. The antibacterial activity of the nanoparticle powder samples was verified using the gram−positive bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. The photocatalytic efficiency of the doped TiO2 nanopowders for degradation of methyl orange (MO) is here examined in order to evaluate the potential applications of these materials for environmental remediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our biopsycholiterary approach deals with the case of Sylvia Plath and works on the assumption that her diaries, short-stories, poetry and fiction come as one coherent, unifying body. We consequently drew on each of these sources in order to more adequately and more convincingly show that the poet's thoughts of death are actually a never-ending line of both her life and art. Dying is for her, as she claims, an art that in the end she gets to perform exceptionally well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenomenology and poetics are two epistemological approaches which aspire, each in its own way, to apprehend reality by getting access to its primary essences. While poetics, from Aristotle to postmodernism, has endeavored to identify the laws according to which literary texts function as such, phenomenology has attempted to describe the processes whereby a conscious subject (re)constructs the deep patterns that support the fabric of the world in its complex manifestations. The present paper concentrates on some of the similarities of the two approaches to meaning and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano is, one critic argues, "the greatest English novel ever set in Mexico about Mexico" (Orr 1989: 20). It is, most of all, one of those literary works that explore the complicated ways in which human beings cope with what is most unfathomable and frightening in their own souls. In his "supreme effort to achieve self-mastery through art" (Falk 1992: 53), Lowry imagined his hero, the damned English Consul who lives his last years in Mexico, as a Faustian character who desperately strives to find the way back to light and peace, but who fails to believe that his salvation is still possible. Hugh Firmin is also an inveterate drunkard whose alcohol addiction makes him hallucinate in some of the most memorable stream-of-consciousness sequences ever written, but he is also "a good man self-destroyed by his inability to overcome whatever it is that prohibits him from loving" (Day 1984: 338). Writing a drunkard's story was one of Lowry's aims in creating this novel as a pioneer work in its class, but this drunkard's story is also Lowry's story: his main subject was always himself and his problems. Under the Volcano symbolically represents the Inferno of what Lowry envisaged as his 'drunken trilogy', just as the two years he spent in Mexico in the 1930s represented his personal descent into a hell of indescribable suffering. The present paper traces his steps in Mexico as he struggled with alcoholism and with the conflicting drives between which he eventually managed to find the path towards his masterpiece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ordinary discourse, any excess of information leads to a high degree of redundancy that obstructs communication. Poetic discourse operates in a completely opposite way: its informational overload enriches meaning through an ambiguity of a particular kind. Shakespeare's work and personality thrive on poetic ambiguity, as seen not only in the authorship controversies perpetuated throughout centuries, but also in the construction of his artistic significations. This paper discusses some examples of discursive, structural and character opacities in Shakespeare's plays, beginning with the witches' equivocation in Macbeth and ending with Caliban's problematic monstrosity in The Tempest. My analysis reveals that Shakespearean ambiguities are most efficient vehicles for the communication of complex, universally relevant meanings and dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stevia rebaudiana is a South American plant that is used as a natural sweetener, being up to 300 times more concentrated than sugar. It is originally from Paraguay, and is currently found in countries such as: Brazil, Korea, Japan, China, etc. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, Stevia rebaudiana is the healthiest sweetener. This has gained popularity in recent years, making its entry into the juice, beverage, tea, etc. industries and can be recommended for patients suffering from diabetes. According to various studies, Stevia rebaudiana (i.e. rebaudioside A, not stevioside) does not aggravate the clinical picture of diabetes. In some states, such as the case of Japan, where artificial sweeteners were banned more than 40 years ago, Stevia rebaudiana started being used, but only after conducting more than 40,000 clinical trials, provided it is consumed in moderate quantities (recommended by specialists). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written during a period of some political unrest, in Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar explores the political consequences resulting from the conflict between private and public virtues exemplified in the person of its tragic hero, Marcus Brutus. The development of the plot is based on the series of more or less contradictory interpretations coming from a number of important characters, among whom Cassius figures prominently. Interpretations, as Friederich Nietzsche observes, are all we have in our vain pursuit of the truth – an affirmation that now, in the age of post-truth, seems ever more adequate. The validity of an interpretation would have to be given by arguments rooted in facts, but the German philosopher argues that even what we call ‘facts’ are actually only interpretations. Shakespeare’s deep understanding of the fact that tragedy is meant “to reveal some particular truth in every agent and at the same time the limitations of this truth” (Jaspers, 1952: 53) is seen in his allowing of various alternative visions to compete with each other in what is apparently a futile quest for the truth. In this paper we analyse some of the discursive strategies the playwright uses to enact his poetic justice and to hint at the true location of truth, beyond the many alternative facts that menace and even temporarily destroy it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of misprision was originally defined by Harold Bloom in his 1973 edition of The Anxiety of Influence. The term itself was not unknown to Shakespeare, who used it in one of his sonnets. The American critic considers that value and originality are the result of a strong misreading on the part of the most talented writers, a misreading resulting from an anxiety that permeates the artist's relation with his or her great predecessors, and which he names "poetic misprision". Our aim in this paper is to study some of the ways in which Shakespeare 'misreads' mythological stories by creating theatrical performances where drama mirrors itself in a sort of mise-en-abyme meant to enhance meaning and to transgress borders between genres or between past and present visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MPRA (Multi Pipeline Register Architecture) was modified and converted into n-task MPRA (nMPRA) by replicating the pipeline registers. While the original MPRA provided hardware scheduling, the interrupts and the events caused too long delays. The author proposes the original solutions for the interrupts and the events treatment, which represent the author's contribution to improving nMPRA; after the theoretical presentations of these solutions in the author's previous articles, this paper presents the implementations of the schemes, the results of the tests and the improved schemes. The MPRA, MPRA4 and MPRA8 implementations on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) were used to evaluate performances. A detailed analysis, partially presented in this paper, shows other advantages: no extra software is required, the hardware implementation is simple, the interrupts and events are similarly handled and the tasks synchronizations and communications are completely based on hardware; MPRA has a low power consumption, even multiplied by eight times, it is reasonably necessary memory and logic resource consumption multiplied by about four times at MPRA4 (compared to MPRA) and by about eight times at MPRA8. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have often approached the 'double-time' crux in William Shakespeare's Othello as a very sensitive issue - it has even been considered as a sign of the playwright's carelessness about the building of the plot. Various explanations have been given to those discursive segments which seem to bring about a sort of contradiction between the 'short time' that ensures the logic of the text and the 'long time' that seems to contradict that textual order. It could be lucrative to ignore the 'long time' sequences and just keep up with the 'short time' of the play, but what we intend to explore in this paper is the idea that the puzzling 'long time' of the Shakespearean discourse in Othello can be seen as a semiotic rendering of passion. Greimas and Fontanille (1993: xxi) have observed that the production of meaning is never purely rational and that the mediation of the body in the process of meaning production brings about certain discordant pulsations in discourse that are manifestations of a passional subject. Our main hypothesis is that the 'long time' in Shakespeare's Othello is the "dilatory time" (1994: 69) of passion, manifested in the text through various types of modalization, and thus it may no longer be seen as contradictory of the message of the play, but very subtly intertwined with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About two million people dies each year because of the heating and cooking systems, one million of them had died as a result of obstructive lung diseases, most of victims were women. The aim of this study was to assess the health of population and the quality of indoor air. Material and methods: 150 people were surveyed in three different areas of the country. The microclimatic parameters in the kitchen have been determined, while the dishes were prepared. Results: The analysis of the questionnaires have shown that the half of those surveyed had suffered frequently of bronchitis, 28% at least once had suffered of pneumonia, 12% of people are suffering of obstructive bronchitis, 7% of asthma, and one person of lung cancer. 20% of investigated respondents have been diagnosed with ischemic heart disease and 7% of them with stroke. The most common sources of fuel used by the population are wood (73%), raw coal (1.3%), processed coal (2%), biomass (0.7%) and crop residues (67%). A high level of carbon dioxide concentration from 0.06% to 0.4% was determined in the kitchen air, as a result of using those fuel sources, the concentration of which exceeds the allowable maximum of 0.3% Conclusions: Inadequate cooking conditions are a risk factor for the development of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]