Towards Personalized Antioxidant Use in Female Infertility: Need for More Molecular and Clinical Studies

Treatment with antioxidants is increasingly used to slow down aging processes in different organs of the human body, including those implicated in female fertility. There is a plethora of different natural, synthetic or semi-synthetic medicines available on the market; most of them can be purchased without medical prescription. Even though the use of antioxidants, even under conditions of auto-medication, was shown to improve many functions related to female infertility related to oxidative stress, the lack of medical control and supervision can lead to an overmedication resulting in an opposite extreme, reductive stress, which can be counterproductive with regard to reproductive function and produce various adverse health effects in general. This paper reviews the current knowledge relative to the effects of different antioxidants on female reproductive function. The persisting gaps in this knowledge are also highlighted, and the need for medical supervision and personalization of antioxidant prescription is underscored.

The Public Interior Space Within Louvre Abu Dhabi Dome: A Visual Reflection

What defines an interior space? Is a traditional threshold the only building element considered as a clear component demarcating interiority from the outside environment? Could light or water be just as clear? How can scale challenge the identification of an internal space? Is a living space more identifiable as an interior volume? What about an internal courtyard for a family house outlining the beginning of a nation or the opposite extreme in the time-space continuum, a 24,000 square meters domed roof over a series of intimate spaces establishing a nation’s cultural intention internationally? Can a central space act as a gravitational point to other space fragments and elements? Can the ephemerality of the space bind it together in a unique, memorable encounter?We set ourselves to answer these questions using different phenomenological responses methods including digital video, photography, drawings, and architectural observations. All depict different layered trajectories through the segments of the architectural strata that compose a cultural enclosure, such as Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi. As we transverses through space and time, we use regional typologies to create a timeline spectrum connecting regional context, culture and architecture, attempting to emphasise the interiority qualities of the space under the dome.

L’homme Nikita

This chapter cites the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) that took place in Zagreb, where the party was renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY). It details how the LCY was modernized and federalized as the umbrella organization of six separate territorial parties. It also mentions Milovan Đilas, chief of agitprop that went much further in the iconoclasm. The chapter analyzes Đilas' articles, in which he argued that Joseph Stalin's ideas had nothing to do with Marxism and that they were much closer to Adolf Hitler's. It discusses how Đilas went to the opposite extreme by proclaiming Stalinism to be fascist in nature while Joseph Stalin was still alive and well in the Kremlin.

Biblical versus Greek Narratives for Suicide Prevention and Life Promotion: Releasing Hope from Pandora’s Urn

Although suicide has been unfortunately stigmatized unfairly through the ages, we should not make the mistake of going to the opposite extreme and valorizing it. We should not forget that the major role of health care professionals is to prevent suicide when possible and to invigorate the underlying life force in the person. Suicide is often the ultimate outcome of a tragic and pessimistic view of life. It was prevalent in ancient Greek writing. Indeed, over 16 suicides and self-mutilations can be found in the 26 surviving tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. In contrast, only six suicides can be found in the Hebrew Scriptures, and only one suicide in the Christian Scriptures. In addition, the Hebrew Scriptures present numerous suicide-prevention narratives that effectively provide a psychological instruction for people in despair which seems unavailable to figures in the writings of the great Greek tragedians. Unfortunately, some religious traditions tended to go to the opposite extreme in stigmatizing suicide rather than understanding it and trying to prevent it. This paper examines evidence regarding seven evidence-based risk factors for suicide: (1) Feeling depressed and isolated; (2) Feeling one’s life is without purpose; (3) Being a refugee from one’s homeland; (4) Feeling unable to express oneself with others; (5) Being adopted; (6) Feeling abandoned by one’s child leaving the family nest; and (7) Feeling doomed by a dysfunctional (indeed incestuous) family of origin We contrast biblical and Greek narratives regarding each of these factors, respectively: (1) Elijah against Ajax, (2) Job against Zeno, (3) David against Coriolanus, (4) Jonah against Narcissus, (5) Moses against Oedipus, (6) Rebecca against Phaedra, and finally, (7) Ruth against Antigone. These biblical figures thrive across risk factors while their Greek and Roman counterparts kill or mutilate themselves or provoke others to do the job. All these contrasts should demonstrate to psychotherapists, counselors, and clergy alike as to how Greek narratives lead to self-destructive behaviors while biblical narratives provide a hopeful positive psychology, and a constructive way out these dilemmas. My colleagues (Paul Cantz, Matthew Schwartz, and Moriah Markus-Kaplan) and I call for a biblical psychotherapy for positive psychology, suicide prevention, and indeed life promotion. Where hope is locked up in Pandora’s urn after she has released all the evils unto the world, the biblical God places hope into the sky as a bow after Noah and his family and all the creatures on the ark disembark to land after the receding of the flood.

Aristotle and DSM on ‘Bipolar’ Melancholy: Symptoms, Medication, Link to Creativity.

That Aristotle connected excellence, creativity to (bipolar) melancholy is known. This article adds depth and detail by distilling from his work characteristics of hot and cold melancholy, placing them in pairs of opposites, and comparing them with the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder in DSM. The Greek warned against extreme mood. He named two examples of mythical persons who suffered the tragic consequences; Ajax’ suicide and Hercules’ manic destruction of his wife and children. More recent examples are Vincent van Gogh, who committed suicide and his brother Theo who attacked his wife and child, was interned and finally succumbed from the consequences of extreme mania. Aristotle urged melancholics to temper their mood. For it was only from mild melancholy that sustained creativity could be expected. He advocated hellebore as medicine. His general ethical advice to strive towards the opposite extreme is especially relevant for melancholics. Aristotle’s work on excellence and bipolar melancholy can inspire those confronted with bipolar disorder today to temper their mood. The examples of famous melancholics throughout the ages bring comfort and a sense of belonging. The author, who is stabilized on lithium, holds up the example of the van Gogh family who, lacking the effective the medicine available today, communicated openly with each other about their disorder. With the new 20th century medication, perfected in our own time, it is from increased openness that the major advances in mental health are now to be expected.

An economic approach to parallel imports effects and competition policy

Parallel imports have been treated very differently in different countries. In the EU, competition law’s very strong (per se) prohibition of restrictions to parallel imports (PI) can be justified by traditional “public interest” concerns related to the EU’s objective to promote free trade and market integration. At the opposite extreme, we have had Russia’s Per Se prohibitions of PI, which can be potentially justified by the country’s industrial policy objectives of protecting its domestic industries. While there is no evidence of a shift in policy by the European Commission (EC) and the EU, there is evidence of a shift in policy in Russia away from the per se prohibition of PI and a recognition that “in some cases” PI should be considered legal. We consider this shift in Russian policy as a shift in the right direction, while we consider unjustified the continuation of EC policy of per se prohibition of restrictions to PI. Our analysis points towards a middle ground in which any question of whether restrictions of PI must be prohibited or not should be the subject of rule-of-reason investigations of the specific economic facts of each case and what these imply for welfare (and, specifically, consumer welfare).

Disorder-Induced Superconductor-Insulator Transition

In this paper, we report the results of our theoretical investigation on the interplay of superconductivity and disorder in two-dimensional (2D) systems. The effect of disorder on superconductivity of 2D systems was found analytically using Green’s function formalism. The results of our calculation revealed that disorder induced due to randomly distributed superconducting islands enhances decoherence of Cooper pairs and suppresses superconductivity. We have also determined the critical value of disorder at which the 2D system completely loses its superconducting properties. Below this critical value of disorder, the system acts as a superconductor, a system with zero electrical resistance. Above the critical value, it acts as an insulator, a system with infinite electric resistance. This is a fascinating result because a direct transition from the state of the infinite conductivity to the opposite extreme of infinite resistivity is unexpected in the theory of condensed matter physics.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOUR AND ALTRUISM

The article deals with the definition and description of the concept of altruism from its ethical and philosophical side against the background of prosocial behaviour. We point out the relation between prosocial behaviour of man and altruism based on a summary of respondents 'opinions on the issues of trustworthiness and efficiency of charitable organizations, respondents' participation in their support and the most common way of donation. Effective altruism is supposed to be a kind of helper for people who want to donate part of their money to charity organizations to improve the world, but are unable to make the right decision about whose financial contribution they are donating. Distrust of charities is becoming more and more current, leading people to stagnate charity. The lack of information on efficiency, functioning, results and a non-transparent list of sources of funding for charitable organizations has prompted us to be more interested in this area. A transparent list of the most effective charities with detailed information on the use of funds to which every person would have access could be a way to express charity and humanity more than ever before. The most ideal scenario is for all people to adopt such behaviour, but in today's world there is the opposite extreme - egoism, selfishness, individualism, materialism and lack of interest in others, which, unfortu-nately, often hide behind altruism. Society, as such, cannot do without altruistic be-haviour, so even "impure" motives can bear fruit, of course, to some extent. Altruism is most often confused with the concept of pro-sociality, as a way of helping others, without expecting the reward that can come, but forms the core not only of ethical education but of each education because it leads to more positive relationships. Living in a society where there is positive energy and people are helping each other is a fuller life.

A dichotomy of sets via typical differentiability

We obtain a criterion for an analytic subset of a Euclidean space to contain points of differentiability of a typical Lipschitz function: namely, that it cannot be covered by countably many sets, each of which is closed and purely unrectifiable (has a zero-length intersection with every $C^1$ curve). Surprisingly, we establish that any set failing this criterion witnesses the opposite extreme of typical behaviour: in any such coverable set, a typical Lipschitz function is everywhere severely non-differentiable.