After the accession of several Central and Eastern European countries to the European Union in 2004, new challenges arose for their highest judicial institutions to define and shape the relationship between the national and European legal order. This paper assesses the first decade of the effort of the Slovak Constitutional Court (SCC) in interpreting the relationship between domestic and EU law via applying the concept of constitutional pluralism which presumes a specific relationship between the legal orders characterized by their heterarchical structure, mutual interaction and cooperation rather than of a hierarchical, monistic structure, governed by clash over dominance. Answering the research question how the SCC has positioned itself vis-à-vis the constitutional monism v. pluralism dilemma can offer an insight on the general relationship between domestic and EU law in Slovakia. By analysing statutory law, selected judgments and reviewing secondary literature, the paper argues that the SCC seems to have chosen the monistic, hierarchical approach to the relationship, having rejected constitutional pluralism. At the same time, this position is not articulated clearly enough due to the veil of secrecy that to some extent still prevails over the SCC’s doctrinal attitudes to EU law. The findings of the paper, which combines conceptual analysis of constitutional pluralism with review of relevant legal provisions and case law, demonstrate the need for a more active and straightforward approach of the SCC when dealing with the challenges of EU law., Max Steuer., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors in the heart have been shown to display agonist-independent spontaneous (constitutive) activity which causes changes in the opening of cardiac ion channels and in the activity of G proteins. We investigated whether an inhibition of the constitutive activity of muscarinic receptors induced by the binding of antagonist brings about a change in the synthesis of cyclic AMP in rat cardiac membranes, and whether the action of the antagonist is stereospecific. Atropine and S-(-)-hyoscyamine were indeed found to enhance the forskolin-stimulated synthesis of cyclic AMP in rat cardiac (both atrial and ventricular) membranes by up to 24%. The effect was stereospecific and the potency of R-(+)-hyoscyamine was 30 fold lower than that of the S-(-) enantiomer, confirming that the action of hyoscyamine is receptor-mediated. The effect did not depend on the presence of endogenous acetylcholine in the system used. The results strongly suggest that the adenylyl cyclase in the heart is exposed to continuous mild inhibition by constitutively active muscarinic receptors in the membranes of cardiomyocytes., J. Říčný, F. Gualtieri, S. Tuček., and Obsahuje bibliografii
The study of the mechanical properties of frozen rock is a basic problem that humans have to face in artificial low-temperature rock engineering and cold region rock engineering. There are few literatures on the dynamic constitutive models of frozen rocks under low-temperature gradients at home and abroad. In this paper, the constitutive model of water-saturated marble under the coupling effects of uniaxial impact compressive load and low-temperature is studied by theoretical analysis and experimental verification. Based on the theory of mechanical element combination, a rock constitutive model considering strain rate effect, damage softening effect and low-temperature effect is established, and the model parameters are determined by fitting method. The dynamic stress-strain curve of water-saturated marble at -30 °Cis predicted. The predicted results are in good agreement with the experimental results and the concordance correlation coefficient is 0.984092. The relevant results of this paper can provide a theoretical reference for the excavation and protection of rock engineering under negative temperature., Junzhe Li, Guang Zhang, Mingze Liu, Shaohua Hu and Xinlong Zhou., and Obsahuje bibliografii
The aim of this study was to investigate whether the inhibition of one of the endothelial receptor sites in the rat pulmonary artery (muscarinic, histaminergic, purinergic, a 2-adrenergic) affects the NO-mediated relaxation induced by the activation of the other type of receptors. Acetylcholine (ACh)-, histamine (Hist)-, adenosine (Ade)- , and clonidine (Clon)-induced endothelium-dependent relaxations were reduced by the administration of specific antagonists of muscarinic, H1-histaminergic, purinergic or a 2-adrenergic receptors, respectively. The inhibition of H1-histaminergic receptors by chlorphenyramine did not prevent ACh-induced relaxation. Similarly, the inhibition of muscarinic receptors by atropine did not prevent the relaxations to histamine, adenosine and clonidine. On the other hand, the relaxations induced by acetylcholine, histamine, adenosine or clonidine were regularly reduced by NO-synthase inhibitor NG-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (10-4 mol/l). These results suggest that the inhibition of NO-synthase abolished arterial relaxations induced by all agonists. After inhibition of one type of the endothelial receptors, the NO-dependent relaxation could still be evoked by activation of one of the others., S. Kyselá, J. Török., and Obsahuje bibliografii