Search results for "Unity"
showing 10 items of 3852 documents
Carbon dynamics of soil organic matter in bulk soil and aggregate fraction during secondary succession in a Mediterranean environment.
2013
Clarifying which factors cause an increase or decrease in soil organic carbon (SOC) after agricultural abandonment requires integration of data on the temporal dynamics of the plant community and SOC. A chronosequence of abandoned vineyards was studied on a volcanic island (Pantelleria, Italy). Vegetation in the abandoned fields was initially dominated by annual and perennial herbs, then by Hyparrhenia hirta (L.) Stapf, and finally by woody communities. As a consequence, the dominant photosynthetic pathway changed from C3 to C4 and then back to C3. Conversion of a plant community dominated by one photosynthetic pathway to another changes the 13C/12C ratio of inputs to SOC. Using the time si…
Challenges of Interdisciplinary University Programs of Studies: The Case of English in Public Communication
2017
The aim of this study is to track students’ self-assessed successes and failures after taking courses in English in Public Communication (EPC) at the University of Opole. This interdisciplinary BA program combines philological, sociological and public communication courses. Using the data from 204 surveys, the study compares the calculated mean scores for the achievement of “new knowledge,” “new skills” and “new social competences” within two groups of subjects: core curriculum courses and practical English courses as declared by the first- and second-year students of EPC. Results show that there are clearer self-recognized knowledge gains, but consistently lower degrees of confidence when …
IL potere degli antenati : il “dispositivo soterico ”nella lex sacra di Selinunte
2013
La colonna "B" della Lex Sacra di Selinunte prescrive una procedura catartica connessa verosimilmente a casi di spargimento di sangue, soprattutto in ambito familiare. Essa ci mostra come a unire i diversi elementi cardine della procedura stessa sia il filo di uno scambio e un riconoscimento reciproco tra diversi livelli di socialità, che ha come unica inviolabile regola che l’applicazione delle prassi cultuali non contrasti con l’interesse generale della polis. Due elementi chiave emergono: a) in primo luogo, la coerenza cronologica delle testimonianze rafforza la pertinenza di queste correlazioni; b) soprattutto emerge con chiarezza, almeno a mio avviso, la relazione con la sfera dell’anc…
Lessons learned from a community engagement initiative within Irish higher education
2018
This paper focuses on a community–university partnership built around a programme of study co-created by residents of a disadvantaged community and situated, for the most part, within that community. The aim of this paper is to share lessons learned from this community engagement initiative, as identified through a research study which ran concurrent to the programme. The study involved 41 interviews (18 individual interviews and 23 focus groups) over a two-year period with 28 participants. Participants included students, lecturers and community and university stakeholders. The finding section focuses on the characteristics of the initiative which allowed it to positively impact those invol…
Prevalence of organ-specific and non organ-specific autoantibodies in healthy centenarians.
1997
In the present study we have investigated the prevalence of organ-specific and non organ-specific autoantibodies in 26 healthy centenarians (6 men, 20 women; age range 101-106 years), using as controls 54 healthy old (33 men and 21 women, age range 71-93) and 56 young subjects (29 men and 27 women, age range 26-60). We assayed sera of each group for the following organ-specific autoantibodies, anti-gastric mucosa (anti-PCA), anti-thyroglobulin (anti-Tg) and non organ-specific autoantibodies, anti-cardiolipin (anti-APA IgG and IgM), anti-nuclear antigens (anti-ANA), anti-double strand DNA (anti-ds-DNA), anti-extractable nuclear antigens (anti-ENA). Finally, natural anti-alpha-galactosyl (ant…
The influence of social support on the wellbeing of immigrants residing in Italy: Sources and functions as predictive factors for life satisfaction l…
2023
Moving from one country to another involves not only separation from the country of origin, but also the tiring process of integration into a new physical, institutional, and sociocultural context, which may expose migrants to acculturation stress. The loss of former support networks, or at the very least their transformation, presents immigrants with the need to rebuild their social support systems in the host country, involving an active search for support. Therefore, the aim of study is to analyze the structure of informal social support and its capacity to predict immigrants’ sense of community, resilience, and satisfaction with life. The results confirm that social support predicts sat…
Imbalance between sympathetic and sensory innervation in peritoneal endometriosis
2011
To investigate possible mechanisms of pain pathophysiology in patients with peritoneal endometriosis, a clinical study on sensory and sympathetic nerve fibre sprouting in endometriosis was performed. Peritoneal lesions (n= 40) and healthy peritoneum (n= 12) were immunostained and analysed with anti-protein gene product 9.5 (PGP 9.5), anti-substance P (SP) and anti-tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), specific markers for intact nerve fibres, sensory nerve fibres and sympathetic nerve fibres, respectively, to identify the ratio of sympathetic and sensory nerve fibres. In addition, immune cell infiltrates in peritoneal endometriotic lesions were analysed and the nerve growth factor (NGF) and interleuki…
2020
Coxsackievirus B (CVB) enteroviruses are common human pathogens known to cause severe diseases including myocarditis, chronic dilated cardiomyopathy, and aseptic meningitis. CVBs are also hypothesized to be a causal factor in type 1 diabetes. Vaccines against CVBs are not currently available, and here we describe the generation and preclinical testing of a novel hexavalent vaccine targeting the six known CVB serotypes. We show that the vaccine has an excellent safety profile in murine models and nonhuman primates and that it induces strong neutralizing antibody responses to the six serotypes in both species without an adjuvant. We also demonstrate that the vaccine provides immunity against …
Effectiveness of different vaccine formulations against vibriosis caused by Vibrio vulnificus serovar E (biotype 2) in European eels Anguilla anguilla
2001
Vibriosis due to Vibrio vulnificus serovar E (biotype 2) is one of the main causes of mortality in European eels cultured in Europe. The main objective of this study was to develop a vaccine and a vaccination procedure against this pathogen. With this aim, we tested several vaccine formulations (inactivated whole-cells with and without toxoids‹inactivated extracellular products‹from capsulated and uncapsulated strains, attenuated live vaccines and purified lipopolysaccharide [LPS]) on eels maintained under controlled laboratory conditions using different delivery routes (injection and immersion). To study the immune response we estimated antibody titers and bactericidal/bacteriostatic activ…
A comparative analysis of the products of GROEL-1 gene fromChlamydia trachomatisserovar D and the HSP60 var1 transcript fromHomo sapienssuggests a po…
2009
Summary Chlamydia trachomatis serovar D produces large quantities of HSP60-1 during infections, which accumulate inside the host cell inducing autoimmunity. We compare the aminoacid sequences of the human HSP60 with the bacterial counterpart to better elucidate how CTHSP60 may simulate HSP60 from human origin during infection and may induce an autoimmune response. As a result of the comparison we suggest several possible epitopes of the CTHSP60, which may induce autoimmunity.