This thesis explores the role of Quaker women in science in an attempt to arrive at some understanding of what motivated Quaker women in nineteenth century America to go into the sciences. George Fox founded the Society of Friends in the mid-seventeenth century in England and the Quaker theology centered...
The atmospheric transport and deposition of semi-volatile organic compounds (SOCs), including current and historic use pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), to mountain ecosystems may result in the exposure of tadpoles to these SOCs. This exposure has been implicated in amphibian population declines in California. Tadpoles encounter...
The objective of this research was to estimate the radiological impact on various non-human biotas by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power plant radiation release resulting from Japan's tsunami in March 2011 consistent with the recent recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Soil concentration data given by Japan's Ministry...
This dissertation describes the cloning and characterization of the TOUSLEDlike kinases genes of maize (ZmTLKs). The TOUSLED-like kinases (TLKs) are a conserved family of nuclear Ser/Thr kinases in higher eukaryotes. The maize genome has three TOUSLED-like kinase genes (ZmTLK1, ZmTLK2, and ZmTLK3). Based upon sequence similarity, the ZmTLKs are divided...
Mosses (Phylum Bryophyta) are widely considered to be among the most ancient groups of land plants (embryophytes) and they are the second most speciose embryophyte phylum with ~13,000 extant species. Despite their diversity and antiquity, mosses have a limited fossil record, which primarily consists of gametophytes entombed in Cenozoic amber....
There are growing interests in designing polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTAS) for optimization problems in planar graphs. Many NP-hard problems are shown to admit PTAS in planar graphs in the last decade, including Steiner tree, Steiner forest, two- edge-connected subgraphs and so on. We follow this research line and study several...
Historians and sociologists of science often identify the efflorescence of social stud ies of science with the work of postwar American intellectuals such as Robert K. Merton and Thomas S. Kuhn. They often also refer to the views of Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) on the roles of tacit knowledge, apprenticeship, social...