The article is the first presentation of Professor Gabriele De Rosa and his view of Italian socio-religious history. As it is the very first article about De Rosa to appear in Poland, it contains basic biographic information and an overview of the most important of his ideas.

Incomplete oxygen reduction gives rise to reactive oxygen species (ROS). For a long time they have been considered unwelcome companions of aerobic metabolism. Organisms using oxygen developed several systems of ROS scavenging with enzymatic and non enzymatic antioxidants, which allow them control the cellular level of oxygen derived from free radicals. It is well established nowadays that ROS are not necessarily negative byproducts, but they also play an important role in cellular mechanisms. They are involved in many regular cellular processes in all aerobic organisms. When the antioxidant system is overcome and the balance between ROS production and scavenging is disrupted, oxidative stress occurs. It has been reported that oxidative stress may be linked to some human diseases and is also involved in biotic and abiotic stress response in plants.

In recent years, the increasing threat to ground water quality due to human activities has become a matter of great con-cern. The ground water quality problems present today are caused by contamination and by over exploitation or by combination of both. Reverse osmosis (RO) desalination is one of the main technologies for producing fresh water from sea water and brackish ground water.

Algeria is one of the countries which suffer from the water shortage since many years, so desalination technology becomes inevitable solution to this matter.

In this study, a comparison is provided of results of reverse osmosis desalination for three different qualities of brack-ish water from the central-east region of Algeria (Bouira and Setif Prefectures), wherein they cannot use it as human drink-ing or in irrigation systems. The main objective of our study is to establish a comparison of the reverse osmosis membrane TW30-2540 performances in the term of (permeate flow, recovery rate, permeate total dissolved solids – TDS and salts re-jection) under different operation pressures (each one takes a time of 720 second for pilot scaling). In order to make an overview comparison between the experimental and the simulated results we used ROSA (Reverse Osmosis System Analy-sis) software.

At the end of this study we noted that, the simulated results are lower than the pilot scaling values and the most re-moved salts are the sodium chlorides with 99.05% of rejection rate.

We determined the level of flavonoids, citric acid and ascorbic acid in hips of rose species from the Caninae section occurring in Poland. We performed phytochemical analyses of 75 samples representing 11 species: Rosaagrestis Savi, R. canina L., R. dumalis Bechst., R. glauca Pourret, R. inodora Fries, R. jundzillii Besser, R. rubiginosa L., R. sherardii Davies, R. tomentosa Sm., R. villosa L. and R. zalana Wiesb. Flavonoid content was determined spectrophotometrically, and organic acid concentrations by HPLC. The content of the studied compounds varied greatly. Interspecific differences in the amount of flavonoids and ascorbic acid were highly significant. The most common species, Rosa canina, showed low average content of vitamin C (0.51 g/100 g of dry matter) and flavonoids (41 mg/100 g DM) and high content of citric acid (3.48 g/100 g DM). Ascorbic acid was highest in R. villosa hips (avg. 2.25 g/100 g DM), flavonoids were highest in R. rubiginosa (72 mg/100 g DM), and citric acid was highest in R. tomentosa (4.34 g/100 g DM). Flavonoid level correlated negatively with the amount of citric acid (r=-0.47, p<0.001). Cluster analysis of rose species based on the content of the investigated compounds confirmed the validity of the division of sect. Caninae into three subsections: Rubiginosae, Vestitae and Rubrifoliae. The phytochemical variation of these roses reflects their probable phylogenetic relationships as determined from morphology.