Background. Metabolic alterations, particularly disorders of lipoprotein metabolism in COVID‐19, may affect the course and outcome of the disease. This study aims at evaluating the lipoprotein profile and redox status in SARS‐CoV‐2 infected patients with different pneumonia severity and their association with lethal outcomes. Methods. The prospective cohort study was performed on 98 COVID‐19 patients with mild, moderate, and severe pneumonia. Lipid and inflammatory parameters, lipoprotein subclasses, and redox status biomarkers were determined at the study entry and after one week. Results. Compared to patients with mild and moderate pneumonia, severely ill patients had higher oxidised low‐density lipoprotein (oxLDL) and malondialdehyde levels and lower high‐density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL‐C) concentrations and paraoxonase 1 activity. Reduction in the proportion of large HDL 2a subclasses with a concomitant increase in the proportion of smallest HDL 3c and small dense LDL (sdLDL) particles was observed in patients with severe disease during the time. However, these changes were reversed in the mild and moderate groups. The results showed a positive association between changes in oxLDL and total antioxidative status. However, prooxidants and antioxidants in plasma were lower in patients with lethal outcomes. Conclusions. Increased levels of oxLDL and sdLDL particles may contribute to the severity of COVID‐19. The role of oxidative stress should be clarified in further studies, mainly its association with lethal outcomes.

The particles from the gas-saturated solutions (PGSS) process was employed to micronize brown algae pigments separated by different extraction techniques. The particle formation of pigments with a coating material, polyethylene glycol (PEG), was carried out by the PGSS process using supercritical CO2. Environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) were performed to characterize the produced particles, while encapsulation efficiency was determined using spectrophotometric methods. The physical properties of obtained microparticles were also determined. The PGSS process enabled a high encapsulation yield in the range from 61.60 to 73.73%, and high encapsulation efficiency in terms of chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, and carotenoid content. The release of CO2 during the PGSS process gave the microparticles their characteristic open and porous form, and enhanced the solubility and flow properties at the same time.

Purpose. The aim of the paper is to examine whether – and to what extent – the concept of Media and Information Literacy (hereinafter: MIL) can be understood as a possible approach to critical pedagogy in practice by examining the adequacy and comprehensibility of the content of its curriculum, previously adapted to the BiH (Bosnian and Herzegovinian) context and its fragmented education system. Approach/methodology. The first part of the paper presents a brief framework of the concept of critical pedagogy, its relationship with media and information literacy, together with the specifics of the education system of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the second part, the paper focuses on the case study of pilot training conducted at the Sarajevo Hasan Kikić elementary school, aiming to acquaint teachers and librarians with the concept and curriculum of MIL. Results. Although teachers and librarians have adopted skills to teach about MIL, the results point to a lack of emancipatory pedagogical practices in the existing education system which could counter various, primarily systemically produced forms of oppression. Originality/value. The value of this paper reflects the efforts to read the concept of MIL through the theoretical lenses of critical pedagogy. Although based on the 2011 UNESCO’s understanding of MIL, the originality of this approach also lies in the fact that the conducted workshops were set down on its curriculum adapted to the Bosnian and Herzegovinian context. Practical implications. The practical implications of this research could be seen through the further processes of researching and promoting collaborative teaching and learning, encouraging thus the development of critical thinking, and thinking individuals capable of combating domination and transforming reality through pedagogy. Social implications. Incorporating critical pedagogy while reading the adapted MIL curriculum can be used for promoting a comprehensive and active role of re-creating knowledge, enabling practices of critical attitude towards the existing social reality, and promoting and strengthening democratic practices.

Abstract The purpose of the paper is to analyse the effects of interpersonal trust in business relations (proxied by trade credit) and institutional trust (proxied by firms’ trust in courts) on firms’ performance. The analysis is performed on a specific sample of 1298 firms in Western Balkan countries which are usually characterized by negative social capital that is considered to hinder economic and social development at all levels. The methodological approach is based on the propensity score matching method and the obtained results show that firms’ perception of courts as fair, impartial and uncorrupted, is connected with lower costs and with positive expectations of an increase in sales in the upcoming period. On the other side, trade credit as a trust variable has a statistically significant and positive effect on firm productivity measured as sales per employee and on expectations of an increase in sales in the upcoming period. The paper contributes to the existing literature in terms of the choice of the post-socialist groups of countries for the analysis, the method that is used (treatment-effects estimation), and in terms of performing firm-level analysis of the effects of two types of trust on selected variables of firm performance.

A hallmark of the development of solid and hematological malignancies is the dysregulation of apoptosis, which leads to an imbalance between cell proliferation, cell survival and death. Halogenated boroxine [K2(B3O3F4OH)] (HB) is a derivative of cyclic anhydride of boronic acid, with reproducible anti‐tumor and anti‐proliferative effects in different cell models. Notably, these changes are observed to be more profound in tumor cells than in normal cells. Here, we investigated the underlying mechanisms through an extensive evaluation of (a) deregulated target genes and (b) their interactions and links with main apoptotic pathway genes upon treatment with an optimized concentration of HB. To provide deeper insights into the mechanism of action of HB, we performed identification, visualization, and pathway association of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) involved in regulation of apoptosis among tumor and non‐tumor cells upon HB treatment. We report that HB at a concentration of 0.2 mg·mL−1 drives tumor cells to apoptosis, whereas non‐tumor cells are not affected. Comparison of DEG profiles, gene interactions and pathway associations suggests that the HB effect and tumor‐‘selectivity’ can be explained by Bax/Bak‐independent mitochondrial depolarization by ROS generation and TRAIL‐like activation, followed by permanent inhibition of NFκB signaling pathway specifically in tumor cells.

The experience of Eastern European countries indicates that a country cannot simultaneously give up autonomy of monetary and fiscal policy and control of labour mobility without all three causing a reduction in potential GDP at the same time. Namely, if a country opts to peg its currency to the currency of a larger (more developed) country and pursues a restrictive fiscal policy, it will probably 2 lead the workforce to emigrate. This universal rule applies to both developing and developed countries. Nevertheless, the specificity of the developing countries' position is that once the labour force leaves the country, it will almost certainly never return. Therefore, labour mobility should be regarded as entirely different when it takes place between countries at distinct levels of development and when it serves as a mechanism for achieving an external balance between countries at similar income levels. As far as we understand, the just described experience of Eastern European developing countries has not yet been formalized anywhere as economic legality, i.e. trilemma. Thus, this paper can be an introduction to the theory of the impossible trinity of developing countries, explaining the basic concepts, connections between them and open questions.

A curricularização da extensão possibilita a preparação dos acadêmicos para sua atuação no mercado de trabalho, a partir da realização das atividades de extensão nas disciplinas da matriz curricular do curso. O objetivo do estudo foi promover uma oficina como curricularização da extensão demonstrando como obter o extrato da C. arborea e usá-lo como bioherbicida, uma vez que metabólitos secundários encontrados na espécie podem ser utilizados como substitutos para os herbicidas sintéticos. A oficina contou com dois momentos sendo o primeiro teórico de maneira dialogada sobre o que são aleloquímicos e seu efeito nas plantas e qual dessas substâncias se encontra na espécie em estudo. O segundo momento foi prático, onde os alunos realizaram todas as etapas do experimento desde a produção do extrato até avaliação e interpretação dos dados. Verificou-se que o extrato da C. arborea reduziu a germinação da C. fistula, confirmando assim seu efeito bioherbicida.

The rapid development of information technology (IT) both forces and supports the transformation of universities in almost all their operations (strategic planning, budgeting, education, research, quality control, cooperation with business and society, etc.). The paper presents the research results related to the digitalization of different processes at universities – more specifically, teachers’ opinions on the effect of digitalization on different processes. The survey was conducted among the University of Mostar, Bosnia, and Herzegovina (BH) teachers. The authors identified processes at the university and investigated the perceived impact of information technology on them. The findings show that the impact of digitalization is positive on most processes, whereby a strong influence is determined for research projects financed by the Ministry of Education, quality management, teaching, and evaluation of acquired knowledge (examination).

This paper aims to investigate factors of profitability in the manufacturing sector in the Republic of Serbia. The research is based on the sample of 220 observations of financial statements of listed companies on the Belgrade stock exchange from sector C – manufacturing during 2017-2020. Profitability was measured as a return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE) being the two most common ratios. Primarily, the descriptive statistics of ROA and ROE were conducted. The results showed that manufacturing companies achieve a positive rate of profitability but at a low level (ROA is 0,0263 and ROE is 0,0595). Furthermore, two regression models were conducted to investigate which internal factors significantly affected ROA and ROE as dependent variables. The independent variables were set: fixed assets ratio, size, current ratio, leverage, and growth. Results of the first model showed that size, current ratio, and growth have a significant positive impact on ROA, while leverage significantly negatively impacts ROA. Results of the second model show that size and growth have a significant positive impact on ROE, while leverage negatively impacts it.

Tobacco is both toxic and addictive. Mounting evidence shows that tobacco use has a detrimental impact on almost every aspect of human health, causing or worsening deadly public health crises from the cancer epidemic to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while tobacco use is a threat to both personal and public health, it continues to surge across the world, especially in China and other low- and middle-income countries. To this end, this article argues in favor of using a ban on the sale of all tobacco products as a practical solution to the global tobacco use epidemic. It is our hope that insights provided by our work will inspire swift policy actions in countries such as China and beyond to curb the tide of rising tobacco consumption, so that populations around the world could be better shielded from the pervasive and long-lasting damage that tobacco products cause or compound.

A modern interdisciplinary analysis of social networks implies detecting and investigating relevant socio-psychological linguistic markers that carry insight on the nature and characteristics of the social discourse. Associating markers to specific words is a further important step, allowing for an even richer interpretation. By taking as a working example the social discourse in Twitter, we propose a scalable method called PageRank-like marker projection (PLMP) following a rationale inspired by PageRank to fully exploit the interdependencies in a semantic network, so as to meaningfully project markers from a social discourse level (tweets) to its semantic elements (words). The effectiveness of PLMP is shown with an application example on calls to online collective action.

An effective aggregation of node features into a graph-level representation via readout functions is an essential step in numerous learning tasks involving graph neural networks. Typically, readouts are simple and non-adaptive functions designed such that the resulting hypothesis space is permutation invariant. Prior work on deep sets indicates that such readouts might require complex node embeddings that can be difficult to learn via standard neighborhood aggregation schemes. Motivated by this, we investigate the potential of adaptive readouts given by neural networks that do not necessarily give rise to permutation invariant hypothesis spaces. We argue that in some problems such as binding affinity prediction where molecules are typically presented in a canonical form it might be possible to relax the constraints on permutation invariance of the hypothesis space and learn a more effective model of the affinity by employing an adaptive readout function. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of neural readouts on more than 40 datasets spanning different domains and graph characteristics. Moreover, we observe a consistent improvement over standard readouts (i.e., sum, max, and mean) relative to the number of neighborhood aggregation iterations and different convolutional operators.

The use of food additive nitrite as curing agents is common in meat products, but their concentration in these products has raised the interest of researchers, because of the possible toxicity to humans.  The aim of this study is to assess the nitrite concentration in meat products, which are highly used by all population groups in Kosovo. A total of 44 different meat products samples available on sale to the population, were assessed for residual nitrite using the spectrophotometric method that uses absorption in visible part of spectra. The amount of residual nitrites was detected in 19 (43%) of the samples, which included beef and chicken sausages, chicken & beef salami as well as beef prosciutto samples. The nitrite residue ranged between 0.1 and 11.5 mg/kg and was below the limits on the concentration of nitrites in meat products established by EU regulation 601/2014.  Although these findings show that, the nitrite residue in the analyzed meat products is within the permitted limits, the highest presence of residual nitrite in industrial and low-cost meat products indicates a need for further assessments of nitrite exposure among consumers.

Introduction: Landmark ISCHEMIA (ISCH) trial provided unique information, but the generalizability of its results into myocardial revascularization guidelines and practice has been met by unprecedented debate. Hypothesis: We aimed to compare the 5 year all-cause mortality (5y Mt) in our ISCH trial like patients (pts) with results in ISCH. Methods: After applying ISCH study inclusion/exclusion criteria we identified 854 pts from our prospective database of 2455 consecutive pts who had the first isolated CABG in 2012-2015 with complex CAD with 100% follow up (F-up) of 5y Mt. Results: Comparative characteristics of ISCH like and actual ISCH pts are presented in Table 1. Аll our pts underwent CABG, contrary to ISCH where CABG and PCI were used in 538 and 1532 pts, consecutively. Although in ISCH pts had high diversity of ethnicity, were older, had more DM2 (but less insulin dependent), and had previous PCI or CABG in 25%, our pts were strikingly sicker (lower LVEF, higher proportion of 3VD and proximal LAD, higher NYHA as well as more comorbidities) 5-year mortality was 8.9% compared to 9% in the Invasive arm of ISCH. Of note 48 h mortality from MI type 5 (post CABG) was 1.67% in ISCH, and 30-day Mt in our study was 1.30%, with complete revascularization in 95%. As expected by the disease severity treated by CABG early Mt was higher in our than ISCH pts (Figure 1). Conclusion: The present study findings outline that translation of results from the ISCHEMIA trial with practice-changing implications into recommendations for a local Heart Team discussion to advise the best treatment decision for patients with more complex forms of CAD is uncertain and requires further research activities.