Extending the temporal context of ethnobotanical databases: the case study of the Campania region (southern Italy)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Ethnobotanical studies generally describe the traditional knowledge of a territory according to a "hic et nunc" principle. The need of approaching this field also embedding historical data has been frequently acknowledged. With their long history of civilization some regions of the Mediterranean basin seem to be particularly suited for an historical approach to be adopted. Campania, a region of southern Italy, has been selected for a database implementation containing present and past information on plant uses.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A relational database has been built on the basis of information gathered from different historical sources, including diaries, travel accounts, and treatises on medicinal plants, written by explorers, botanists, physicians, who travelled in Campania during the last three centuries. Moreover, ethnobotanical uses described in historical herbal collections and in Ancient and Medieval texts from the Mediterranean Region have been included in the database.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>1672 different uses, ranging from medicinal, to alimentary, ceremonial, veterinary, have been recorded for 474 species listed in the data base. Information is not uniformly spread over the Campanian territory; Sannio being the most studied geographical area and Cilento the least one. About 50 plants have been continuously used in the last three centuries in the cure of the same affections. A comparison with the uses reported for the same species in Ancient treatises shows that the origin of present ethnomedicine from old learned medical doctrines needs a case-by-case confirmation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The database is flexible enough to represent a useful tool for researchers who need to store and compare present and previous ethnobotanical uses from Mediterranean Countries.</p

The Journal of Organic Chemistry 55 3 1093 1096

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Journal of the American Chemical Society 120 37 9702 9703

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Tunable room-temperature soft ferromagnetism in magnetoceramics of organometallic dendrimers

The development of new methods of assembling matter to access advanced materials, such as magnetoceramics, remains a worthwhile research challenge. Several approaches to generate such materials include pyrolysis of linear and hyperbranched polymer precursors. In this study, homometallic iron-containing (Fe), and heterometallic iron- and cobalt-containing (Fe–Co) dendrimers were used to generate magnetoceramics with tunable room temperature and soft ferromagnetism. The yet-to-be-explored dendritic precursors offer opportunities to control the magnetic properties via dendritic effects and functionalization with multiple ferromagnetic metals. Indeed, we tuned the magnetic properties of the homometallic ceramics via dendritic effects. Specifically, the saturation magnetization ( M s ) and coercivity ( H c ) decrease as the generation of the dendrimer increases. Incorporating Co into the dendrimers to synthesize heterometallic dendrimers noticeably changed the magnetic properties of the ceramics. M s and H c increased in ceramics derived from the second-generation dendrimer but these properties decreased in ceramics derived from zeroth- and first-generation dendrimers. The ferromagnetism in the homometallic and heterometallic ceramics differs in its response to changes in temperature. For instance, we observed that the homometallic ceramics were less susceptible to the changes in temperature, exhibiting a magnetic phase transition at ∼210 K in contrast to the heterometallic ceramics with a transition at ∼110 K. Overall, the results present dendrimers as a new type of precursors for magnetoceramics and expand the parameter space toward understanding magnetism in ceramics, allowing for the development of ceramics with tunable magnetism