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Abstract
This essay introduces new evidence for an eschatological Phoenician motif that alludes to a final sailing and its perils, represented by a monstrous lion attacking or sinking a boat. The lion-and-boat motif was, so far, only documented in a Phoenician funerary stela from late classical Athens, the Antipatros/Shem stela. Excavations at the fifth-century BCE Tartessic site of Casas del Turuñuelo in southwestern Spain has revealed a set of ivory and bone panels that decorated a wooden box, bearing relevant iconography in the so-called orientalizing style. Additional comparanda from the Levant, Iberia, and Tunisia in various media (coins, ivories, amulets), add weight to this interpretation. Our analysis highlights how the artists behind the Athenian and Tartessic artifacts were innovative in their way of representing a theme that was not codified iconographically. Most remarkable is the use of an ivory-carving convention (the Phoenician palmette motif) to portray the stylized boat, a choice corroborated by a painted pottery sherd from Olympia. This “palmette-boat” depiction, in our view, is coherent with Egyptian Nilotic boats, but also with the use of flat or shallow river-boats in the Tagus and Guadiana region, illustrating mechanisms of local adaptation of Phoenician sailing and life-death “passing” symbolism. If, as we suggest, this representation can be added to that in the Athenian document, we now have testimonies of two different local adaptations of a Phoenician theme at the two ends of the Mediterranean oikoumene between the archaic and late classical periods.
series of push-pull chromophores built around thiophene-based . π-conjugating spacers and bearing various types of amino-donors and cyanovinyl-acceptors have been analyzed by means of UV-Vis- NIR spectroscopic measurements. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations have also been performed to help the assignment of the most relevant electronic features and to derive useful information about the molecular structure of these NLO-phores. The effects of the donor/acceptor substitution in the electronic and molecular properties of the .π -conjugated spacer have been addressed. The effectiveness of the intramolecular charge transfer (ICT) has also been tested as a function of the nature of the end groups (i.e., electron-donating or electron-withdrawing capabilities).
The RHEA project (Robot Fleets for Highly Effective Agriculture and Forestry Management), funded by the 7th EC Framework Programme, focused on the configuration of a new generation of automated and robotic systems for both chemical and physical management of pests including weed control. RHEA addresses the crop treatments by a reconfigurable fleet of robots composed of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with advanced perception systems, improved end-effectors and enhanced decision-making algorithms. This paper describes the most important aspects of the modules that integrate RHEA and gives some performance results extracted from the trials conducted at the CSIC Experimental Farm (Madrid, Spain), in particular the weed treatment in two winter wheat fields.