Abstract The objective of this paper is to verify if Google Books Ngram Viewer, a new tool working on a database of 361 billion words in English, and enabling quick recovery of data on word frequency in a diachronic perspective, is indeed valuable to socio-cultural research as suggested by its creators (Michel et al. 2010), i.e. the Cultural Observatory, Harvard University, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Google. In the paper we introduce a study performed by Greenfield (2013), who applies the program to her Ecological Analysis, and contrast the findings with a study based on similar premises, in which we follow the trends in changes in word frequency throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to observe if these changes correspond to one of the major socio-cultural transformations that took place in the studied period, i.e. mediatization. The results of this study open a discussion on the usefulness of the program in socio-cultural research.

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Reactive oxygen species are formed as a natural product of metabolic processes occurring in the organism or under the influence of external factors. Under homeostasis, they play an important role as a cellular signaling device. During oxidative stress, when they are produced in excess, they can cause damages to proteins, lipids, carbohydrates or nucleic acids. Exposure of cells and extracellular structures to free radicals activate natural mechanisms to eliminate free radicals and their derivatives. The aim of the article was to present what antioxidants are, and how they protect cells against the free radicals. The protective system against the free radicals consists of antioxidant enzymes: superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione peroxidases, and reductase. Low-molecular antioxidants such as vitamin C, E, carotenoids, coenzyme Q10, flavonoids, glutathione and melatonin also play an important role.

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The objective of this article is to examine the relationship between the thematic structure of news texts and the context of national culture in which they were produced. The study, though being part of a larger project, concerns only two front-page articles published in two national Polish and British dailies. The first stage of the study refers to an examination and determination of the thematic structure of news text, based on Teun A. van Dijk's analysis of international and national news in the press. In the second stage of the analysis, the results of the study are confronted with the cultural dimensions model proposed by Hofstede and Hofstede and the scores for Poland and United Kingdom, as well as with Hall's insights into the differences between high-context and lowcontext cultures.