The concentrations and distributions of major polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were determined in 20 kinds of yogurt specimens collected from Italian supermarkets using reversed phase high-performance liquid chromatography equipped with fluorescence detection. The method was validated by determination of recovery percentages, precision (repeatability) and sensitivity (limits of detection) with yogurt samples fortified at 0.25, 0.5 and 1 µg/kg concentration levels. The recovery of 13 PAHs, with the exception of naphthalene and acenaphthene, ranged from 61% to 130% and from 60% to 97% at all the levels for yogurts with low (0.1%) and high (3.9%) fat content, respectively. The method is repeatable with relative standard deviation values <20% for all analytes. The results obtained demonstrate that acenaphthene, fluorantene, phenanthrene, anthracene, fluoranthene and pyrene were found in all samples with a similar distribution, but different content when yogurts with low and high fats were compared.

Pregnancy can be defined a vascular event upon endocrine control. In the human hemo-chorial placentation the chorionic villi penetrate the wall of the uterine spiral arteries, to provide increasing amounts of nutrients and oxygen for optimal fetal growth. In any physiological pregnancy the natural maternal response is of a Th1 inflammatory type, aimed at avoiding blood loss through the arteriolar wall openings. The control of the vascular function, during gestation as in any other condition, is achieved through the action of two main types of prostanoids: prostaglandin E2 and thromboxane on the one hand (for vasoconstriction and coagulation), prostacyclin on the other (for vasodilation and blood fluidification). The control of the maternal immune response is upon the responsibility of the fetus itself. Indeed, the chorionic villi are able to counteract the natural maternal response, thus changing the inflammatory Th1 type into the anti-inflammatory Th2. Clinical and experimental research in the past half century address to inflammation as the leading cause of abortion, pregnancy loss, premature delivery and related pulmonary, cerebral, intestinal fetal syndromes. Increased level of Interleukin 6, Interleukin 1-beta, Tumor Necrosis Factor-alfa, Interferon-gamma, are some among the well-known markers of gestational inflammation. On the other side, COVID-19 pneumonia is a result of extensive inflammation induced by viral replication within the cells of the respiratory tract. As it may happen in the uterine arteries in the absence of an effective fetal control, viral pneumonia triggers pulmonary vascular coagulation. The cytokines involved in the process are the same as those in gestational inflammation. As the fetus breathes throughout the placenta, fetal death from placental thrombosis is similar to adult death from pulmonary thrombosis. Preventing and counteracting inflammation is mandatory in both conditions. The most relevant literature dealing with the above-mentioned concepts is reviewed in the present article.

This essay will analyze how the Gothic representation of wives imprisoned, effaced and even killed by their husbands, literalizes and thereby demystifies the legal abstraction of coverture. Under this legal principle, the wife became an unperson, because her legal identity was "covered" by that of her husband. Through a literal or metaphorical death (enclosure in a castle, convent or a madhouse), the Gothic genre portrays the civil death and the effacement of women's legal identity. The trope of the dangerous male relative (mainly the father or the husband) reflects the patriarchal legal reality responsible for the social death of the woman. Specific attention will be devoted to the novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (posthumously published in 1798), in which Wollstonecraft deconstructs the ideology of marriage by which women are e xchangeable commodities and are denied their natural rights, and uses the sexualized female body as a revolutionary medium of communication; the essay will then analyze Catherine Perkins Gilmore's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), in which the protagonist, enclosed in a room of a country mansion, entrusts her denounce of the punitive, patriarchal set of institutions that require and actually effect the suppression of women's autonomy and self-expression to her writings (her book of evidence), thus claiming her own individual voice and her struggle for the preservation of her identity.

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This essay aims at highlighting the different cultural and metaphorical outcomes introduced by the vampire as created by Bram Stoker and by post modern rereadings of the vampire, with a particular focus on the novels The Southern Vampire Mysteries and the American Tv series True Blood which is the transposition of the novels. The preliminary statement of this essay is that the law is a recurrent theme within Gothic literature; the figure of the vampire (canonized by Bram Stoker's Dracula) metonymically stands for the uncertainty of a foreign legal system as opposed to the rationality of the English legal system. Moving to the postmodern age, I will analyse the contemporary manifestation of the Gothic imagination, by focusing on the figure of the vampire, within the context of an encounter with poststructuralist theory and the politics of postmodernity. If Dracula is, from a legal and a social viewpoint, a bounded and controlled entity and identity because he is the only one of his species and, as such, has no other options but to adapt to society itself, in the contemporary rereading of the vampire offered by The Southern Vampire Mysteries and True Blood, the vampire epitomizes the dialogue and relation between cultural diversities. The novels and the Tv series, in becoming a metaphorical reflection on issues linked to multi culturalism, help us reconfigure and redevelop problems of multiculturalism in order to suit changing conditions and create an overarching set of rules and reg ulations that are free from the disadvantages of onesidedness or arbitrariness. The undertaking of elaborating normative recommendations capable of tran scending the barriers of culture, race and religion seems to be full of intellectual, political and legal dangers, since it could be problematic to use conceptual frameworks created by one culture (human culture) to describe and evaluate the reality of another (vampiric culture).

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This essay aims at analysing the contemporary revision of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast re-told by Angela Carter in “The Tiger’s Bride.” In my critical approach I will intertwine two distinct theoretical strands: one focused on the concept of ‘skin’ and its role as idiom of personhood and identity and the other focused on the notion of the dressed/undressed body, its political power and the manner in which clothing acts as a form of embodiment. I will be focusing on the idea of both body/skin and the dressed body as telling traces of the cultural negotiations of identity and difference by analysing the transformation of Beauty into an animal and the figure of The Beast, as a strange being in a dimension between human and animal. It is precisely the movement of these bodies- naked, clothed and masked- in a liminal zone, an area of exclusion, that makes them the powerful destroyers of the rules of normalcy and allows them to deconstruct the normative perspectives of biopolitics, defined by Michel Foucault as the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population.