Current views on the possible involvement of aluminum in the etiology of Alzheimer's disease

The aim of the study was to investigate the possibility of using а concentration of aluminum as a marker of neurodegenerative diseases.Material and methods. To achieve this goal, there was carried out an analysis of literary origins from various databases, in particular Scopus and PubMed.Results. The analysis shows that by now there has been accumulated strong evidence that certain neurodegenerative diseases are associated with chronic exposure to low-dose of aluminum: in particular, Alzheimer's disease (AD); motor neuron disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS); multiple sclerosis (MS) and a number of others.Conclusion. Thus, it can be assumed that the measurement of the concentration of Al in the blood plasma will make it possible to identify a group people with of high risk of AD, which will allow starting preventive treatment at the earliest stage of the disease. The capabilities of the existing methods of analysis: atomic absorption spectrometry with electrothermal atomization (GFAAS) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) enable to solve this problem.

The Vision of an Axe. Dostoevsky and Astronautics

This essay explores the scientific and literary origins of the image of an axe thrown into outer space to orbit the earth, as it appears in the chapter “The Devil. The Vision of Ivan Fyodorovich” in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Did Dostoevsky anticipate the idea of an artificial satellite, as many critics and journalists argue? How were science (in this case astronomy) and literature connected in his mind? How did Dostoevsky’s scientific and creative imagination work in general? The author shows that Dostoevsky’s “prophetic” reference to a sputnik was rooted in popular articles and textbooks about Newton’s mechanics and in Marko Vovchok’s (Maria Vilinskaya’s) translation of Jules Verne’s science fiction novel Around the Moon (“Autour de la Lune”), published in The Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik) in 1869. The novel relates the chronicle of a voyage of brave researchers inside a cannonball that was fired out of a giant space gun. The essay reconstructs the trajectory of Verne’s image of a manmade satellite in Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The Vision of an Axe. Dostoevsky and Astronautics

This essay explores the scientific and literary origins of the image of an axe thrown into outer space to orbit the earth, as it appears in the chapter “The Devil. The Vision of Ivan Fyodorovich” in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Did Dostoevsky anticipate the idea of an artificial satellite, as many critics and journalists argue? How were science (in this case astronomy) and literature connected in his mind? How did Dostoevsky’s scientific and creative imagination work in general? The author shows that Dostoevsky’s “prophetic” reference to a sputnik was rooted in popular articles and textbooks about Newton’s mechanics and in Marko Vovchok’s (Maria Vilinskaya’s) translation of Jules Verne’s science fiction novel Around the Moon (“Autour de la Lune”), published in The Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik) in 1869. The novel relates the chronicle of a voyage of brave researchers inside a cannonball that was fired out of a giant space gun. The essay reconstructs the trajectory of Verne’s image of a manmade satellite in Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Anglo-Saxonism and the Victorian Novel

This chapter argues for the interest and importance of Anglo-Saxonist novels when analysing questions of identity in Victorian Britain. Focusing on the nineteenth century’s two longest works of literary Anglo-Saxonism—Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1848 historical novel Harold and Charles Kingsley’s 1866 Hereward the Wake—it reveals that, contrary to contemporary opinion, these works do not assert, but rather question and investigate, simplistic notions of national identity. Both books are often dismissed as simply poor imitations of the earlier work of Sir Walter Scott. The chapter traces their literary origins to well before Scott; argues that the texts differ importantly from Scott’s work, in ways that can tell us much about the mid-nineteenth century; and reveals how the books intersect in important ways with other manifestations of Victorian medievalism, and have also had an important legacy in the medievalism of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries.

The shadow of the bear

New approaches built over the past ten years make it possible to address several long-standing questions regarding Guiron le Courtois. In particular, these studies illuminate ambiguities related to the literary origins of the protagonist and of his family. Guiron’s lineage as well as that of Galeholt le Brun, his mentor, include powerful individuals; and yet these strong characters remain peripheral, seldom crossing into the orbit of the Arthurian court. Of their lives only certain segments are known, and these alternate with imprisonment and incognito chivalric adventures. The Roman de Guiron, the core narrative of the cycle, most likely drew the protagonist’s name from the tradition of Arthurian lais but reinvented from scratch his chivalric biography, playing on the ambiguity of the relations between Guiron’s family and the Bruns, the family of Galeholt. One mirrors the other, and both seem to converge towards the archaic figures of the giant and the bear, while the plot unfolds in an unusual retro-chronology, drawing the reader’s sight to their origins.

Inlays of Subjectivity

Inlays of Subjectivity is an incisive exposition of the question of subjectivity in modern Indian literature. Seeking to foreground subjectivity through literary expressions of intense emotionality, whether suffering, humiliation, creativity or strife, it also raises the timely question of the relation of justice and speech. This book studies select influential Indian literary texts across the last hundred years in various Indian languages to find overlapping preoccupations with selfhood. As the first chapter on K. R. Meera’s fiction demonstrates, it is the experience of felt injustice that first opens up the realm of subjectivity. Subjectivity is equally opened up by intense negative affect—such as the experience of humiliation—the memoirs of the Dalit writer Urmila Pawar testify to this in the second chapter. The next two chapters trace the historical and literary origins of this question of subjectivity through the novels of canonical writers such as Agyeya, Ismat Chughtai, Saratchandra Chatterjee, and Rabindranath Tagore. The fifth chapter turns to the subtle and powerful writer Krishna Sobti to bring together all these strands of subjectivity, affect and moral agency required in navigating an unequal and harsh world. The book thus hopes to provoke questions of the literary modes for exploring subject positions in a defined Indian literary milieu, and to reflect upon the relationship of literature, subjectivity, and affect.