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This work investigated the blotting sands used on the account books of the religious houses scattered across continental Portugal and Madeira Island (16th-19th centuries). The sands were mainly composed of different minerals, predominately black sands, but in a few cases, minerals were found mixed with gums, paper cocoons or bone shavings. The combined use of SEM-EDS, µ-Raman and FT-IR techniques uncovered the materials' chemical or mineralogical composition and morphology. This approach, allied with image analysis and statistics complemented with multivariate analysis, allowed us to look for trends between the samples and hypothesise about their provenance. Heavy minerals, such as ilmenite, hematite and almandine, were identified as major components, together with other silicates (e.g. quartz). Samples were dominated by medium-sized grains with shape features indicating texturally mature sediments resulting from a medium-to-long sedimentary transport. Due to shorter geological transport distances, Madeira Island was the exception, with more angular grains. This work allowed us to uncover blotting sands, value them as historical sources, and establish a roadmap for their use in Portugal, aiming to pave the way towards a more global context in Europe. The authors acknowledge the National Archive of Torre do Tombo (ANTT), National Library of Portugal (BNP) and Public Library of Évora (BPE) for providing access to the samples and FCT for funding (IronIC project PTDC/ART-HIS/32327/2017, UIDB/04449/2020, UIDP/04449/2020, and UIDB/00057/2020). M. Nunes thanks the support of the FCT for a PhD grant (SFRH/BD/147528/2019), and G. Wanzeller Martins also thanks FCT for the grant BI-PTDC/ART-HIS/32327/2017 in the scope of the IronIC project (http://ironic.fcsh.unl.pt/). The authors gratefully acknowledge Prof. A. Senra Martins for his helpful contribution. The authors also wish to acknowledge the professional support of the Interdisciplinary Thematic Platform from CSIC Open Heritage: Research and Society (PTI-PAIS). Too little is known about areia de escrever, i.e., blotting sands, the intriguing particles sprinkled on freshly written scripts to accelerate the drying time of the ink. Blotting sands constitute a valuable but underestimated historical source. Peer reviewed

This paper demonstrates the efficacy of portable mid-infrared spectroscopy as a diagnostic tool for revealing the presence of lead carboxylates on artworks, in situ, without sampling. Samples of cerussite and hydrocerussite - the main components of lead white - were separately mixed with linseed oil, and artificially aged in two steps. Their compositional changes have been monitored over time by infrared spectroscopy in two investigation modes: absorption (benchtop instrument) and reflection (portable instrument), and by XRD spectroscopy. Each component of lead white showed different behavior depending on aging conditions, giving important information about the degradation products which are found in real cases. The accordance of results obtained in both modalities demonstrates that portable FT-MIR is a reliable technique for individuating and identifying lead carboxylates directly on paintings. Examples of the efficacy of this application are provided, by studying paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Oxidative stress has been reported to be closely associated with many diseases, and an excessive overdose of hypochlorite (ClO

Non-destructive preservation state estimation is an essential prerequisite for the preservation and conservation of waterlogged archaeological wooden artifacts. Herein, Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy coupled with orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) were applied to assess sixty-four waterlogged archaeological woods collected from seven excavation sites in the period range of 2900 BCE-1912 CE, aiming at developing a non-destructive, accurate and rapid preservation state estimation methodology. The role of non-decayed recent wood of relevant species on preservation state estimation was studied in prior, showing the use of non-decayed recent wood could not improve the predictive ability. Besides, the high variability in terms of chemical structure between archaeological softwoods and archaeological hardwoods did affect the preservation state estimation. Thus, a simple OPLS-DA model of non-destructively distinguishing archaeological hardwoods from softwoods, R

Circular dichroism (CD) methods have been developed for the analysis of luliconazole (LUC) using plant based silver nanoparticles (P-AgNPs). Cleaner and natural approach have found significant attention in recent times owing to their exceptional physicochemical characteristics. Utilizing FTIR, SEM, and XRD, the produced nanoparticles were analyzed. The produced P-AgNPs were then used to assay LUC in formulation drugs. Four CD methods are developed as zero order and second order derivative methods. Methods I and II are based on a normal CD scan (zero order) that produced calibration range from 2 - 16 μgmL