“Leona Knight - Fort Bend Herald” plus 4 more |
- Leona Knight - Fort Bend Herald
- Hawaii gets $840,000 grant to study plant biology - Oregonian
- Student biology research presented - Arizona Daily Wildcat
- Why Your DNA Isn’t Your Destiny - Food Consumer
- Synthetic biology cells produce light show - BBC Science/Nature
| Leona Knight - Fort Bend Herald Posted: 23 Jan 2010 08:13 AM PST Leona J. Knight, 94, passed away peacefully Friday, Jan. 15, 2010 after a brief illness. Leona was born Nov. 12, 1915, in Needville. She was one of seven children born to Judge Charles T. and Annie Zich. She was raised by strong people to be strong, and she is best remembered by family and friends for her strength of character and physical stamina. Leona graduated from Richmond High School in 1932, and enrolled at Blinn County College is Brenham. Upon earning an associate of science at BCC in 1934, she enrolled at Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville. It was there that she earned her bachelor of science in education and science in 1936. It is also where she met her future husband, Gilbert L. Knight. After graduation, she taught at the Fulshear School in Fort Bend County and later at Patty Welda High School in Victoria. In 1941, she married her college sweetheart, Gilbert Knight, who was an ensign in the U.S. Navy, in pilot training at NAS Corpus Christi. When Gilbert was transferred by the Navy to England later in 1941, Leona enrolled at the University of Tennessee in Oak Ridge. There, she earned masters of science in education and biology. After receiving those degrees, she remained in Oak Ridge as a member of the Manhattan Project. She taught high school biology and health education to the children of the scientists building the world's first two atomic bombs. After World War II, Leona joined her husband at NAS Portsmith, R.I., in 1946. In 1949, Gilbert was transferred to Key West, Fla. In 1951, they returned to NAS Corpus Christi. In 1953, Gilbert and Leona moved to Washington, D.C., where Gilbert was assigned to Naval Intelligence in Central America. It was while residing in Panama that Leona gave birth Jan. 23, 1953 to their only child, Thomas L. Knight. Gilbert was later recalled to Washington, D.C., where he served as Adjutant to the U.S. Navy representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He and Leona returned to Panama in 1961, where Leona taught high school biology and health to the children of the employees of the Panama Canal Company. In 1966, Gilbert was transferred to Kodiak, Alaska, where he served as NAS Executive Officer and where Leona taught biology and health at Kodiak High School. In 1968, Gilbert was, again, transferred back to NAS Corpus Christi as Security Officer. Leona began teaching health at Carroll High School until her retirement in 1977. In 1978, Leona became active in the local Republican Party. She served as Vice President of the Nueces County Republican Women's Club and as precinct 91 Republican Chairman. In 1982, she actively campaigned to elect Gene Seaman as the Chairman of the Nueces County Republican Party. Upon Gene's election, she served as Vice Chairman of the Local GOP from 1982 to 1988. She was elected as State GOP Committeewoman in 1984 and reelected in 1986. In 1984, she served as local Co-Chairman of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign. Also, she was Vice Chairman of the Corpus Christi Republican Women's Club. In 1988, Leona served as 27th Congressional District Chairman of George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign. She attended the 1988 Republican National Convention as an at-large alternate delegate for George H.W. Bush. Leona also represented Nueces County Republicans as a delegate to Republican State Conventions in 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984 and 1986. Leona retired from politics in 1990 and devoted her energies to caring for Gilbert and managing the family ranch in Needville. Leona was preceded in death by her husband; parents; three brothers; and two sisters. She is survived by son, Tom Knight of Corpus Christi; brother, Wallace Zich of Geissen, Germany; four nephews; two nieces; and her beloved dog, Kirby, and her 47 year-old parrot, Rio. At Leona's request, no services will be held. Her life and legacy will be celebrated at a "Remembering Leona" event in the near future. To view the guestbook, leave condolences and share memories please visit www.seasidefuneral.com. Funeral arrangements are under the direction of Seaside Funeral Home, 4357 Ocean Dr. in Corpus Christi, 361-992-9411. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | |
| Hawaii gets $840,000 grant to study plant biology - Oregonian Posted: 22 Jan 2010 04:42 PM PST (AP) — HONOLULU - The National Science Foundation is awarding a $840,000 three-year research grant to the University of Hawaii for the study of plant biology. The money will support research on enzyme-mediated protein folding in plants, which plays a major role in the formation and protein content of seeds. Protein folding is also an important factor in agricultural yields and grain nutrition.
The university said Friday that methods developed in this research are expected to have industrial uses and help the treatment of crop disease. The research project being supported by the grant is in its sixth year. It provides students and faculty with opportunities to learn state-of-the art methods in plant genomics, molecular and cellular biology and biochemistry. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | |
| Student biology research presented - Arizona Daily Wildcat Posted: 21 Jan 2010 09:59 PM PST More than 100 undergraduate student researchers will present poster projects of their research at the Undergraduate Biology Research Program conference Saturday. The conference will be held at the Keating (BIO 5) building on the UA Health Sciences Center Campus, north of Speedway, from 1-5 p.m. Established in 1988, the Undergraduate Biology Research Program provides paid research experience to undergraduate students by putting them to work in labs. A two-year Undergraduate Biology Research Program participant, Brittany Choate truly loves what the program does for students like her. Choate works with an environmental microbiology doctoral candidate filtering water to check for fatal pathogens in Arizona recreational waters due to climate change. "It's been a really, really fun gig, and I'm just glad that I got the chance to do it," she said. Students get the chance to be funded for lab work by the program and their backer, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Students work hands-on in each laboratory. "They're not just washing dishes and counting petri plates," Choate said. "They actually get to run their own experiments and get hands-on experience with real-life lab work." And these opportunities are open to undergrads in any major wanting to study biology. BRAVO! is the international research arm of Undergraduate Biology Research Program, said Kevin Keys, a math and linguistics major who studied biochromatics in skin pigmentation in Barcelona this past summer. "They funded me to do biology research even though I wasn't a biology student," Keys said. "The experience influenced me in my graduate applications … in statistics and biomathematics programs geared towards genetics, and I wouldn't have known about it without UBRP." At the conference, there will be alumni of the program from Brown University, University of Colorado, Denver and some from the UA, like Joyce Schroeder and Jessie Brown, who will be presenting along with the undergraduate members of the program. Giving a small introduction to their topic, the timeliness of their research and their findings, students‑ on a poster‑ present their work. "It's a place where a bunch of UBRP students can present the research that they've been doing," said Robert Gonzales, an undergraduate studying the faults of current Parkinson's research and treatments. "It's an open venue so people can walk around, look at the posters and get an idea of the research the person has been doing and interact with the person doing the actual research," he said. The program is accepting applications until mid-March for summer research, which can be extended into the school year.
For more information, visit https://ubrp.arizona.edu or contact Carol Bender, program director at bender@email.arizona.edu. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | |
| Why Your DNA Isn’t Your Destiny - Food Consumer Posted: 23 Jan 2010 07:59 AM PST
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | |
| Synthetic biology cells produce light show - BBC Science/Nature Posted: 22 Jan 2010 12:58 AM PST |  The cells produce waves of light as they express a fluorescent protein Scientists have produced a very unusual light show, engineering bacterial cells to fluoresce in synchrony. The researchers turned the cells into synchronised "genetic clocks" - programming them to switch a fluorescent protein on and off. These waves of activity could eventually be used to make biological sensors, or to programme cells to release timed doses of medicine. The researchers report the advance in the journal Nature. Synchronised waves, or oscillations, are important to scientists because they control crucial functions in the human body, such as the sleep-wake cycle, learning processes and the regular release of substances including insulin. This same team of researchers, which was led by Dr Jeff Hasty from the University of California San Diego, US, first produced "flashing" cells a year ago. These bacterial clocks could be tuned to alter the rate at which they blinked on and off. But this latest advance allows the cells "talk to each other" and synchronise their activity as they grow into a colony. "If you want a sensor - if you want to use the rate at which the cells switch on and off to signal something about the environment, you need a synchronised signal," explained Dr Hasty. To achieve this, he and his team incorporated two genes into the bacterial cells. One of the genes produced what he described as "a negative feedback system". This was the key component that stimulated oscillations in the cells - effectively switching the fluorescent protein on and off. The other gene produced a chemical that travelled between the cells, allowing them to talk to each other and communicate the rate of his oscillation. Professor Martin Fussenegger, a scientist from the Swiss science and technology university ETH Zurich, who was not involved in the study, said that this was "the first time that time-keeping devices in different individual cells had been synchronised". "It's a dramatic achievement. The real breakthrough [will be] when we can do this in mammalian cells, and this has laid the foundation for that," he told BBC News. "Oscillators could eventually be designed to produce insulin every six hours [in diabetic patients]. "When doctors tell you to take this pill three times a day, that's this is nothing more than an oscillation - a dose at a frequency. An engineered oscillator could do this automatically." In this same issue of Nature, the editors have marked what many scientists consider to be the 10th anniversary of the birth of synthetic biology - the discipline that sets out to engineer or manipulate life. "Part of the whole excitement of synthetic biology was to make a branch of molecular biology into an engineering discipline," said Dr Hasty. "The aim is to use computational tools to design biological circuits from scratch. "We're not quite there yet, but we can already design some of these [simple] systems." Print Sponsor Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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