Homer Scott Swingle is known as the father of pond management and made significant contributions to aquaculture by establishing methods for creating self-sustaining fish populations, which provided inexpensive protein sources during challenging times. He also played a key role in expanding the Auburn University Fisheries Department into a leading institution for fishery research and education.
Walter C. Rawls, Jr., scientist, lawyer, was born in Richmond, Virginia. His sociological and scientific investigations have taken him to many countries of the world as a consultant to governments and world organizations. He is acknowledged in national and international directories and is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the New York Academy of Sciences. For the past six years he has actively worked with the Albert Roy Davis Research Laboratory in Green Cove Springs, Florida.
Carl Munck is known for coining the term "archaeocryptography," which involves decoding ancient monuments by finding mathematical patterns in their design and placement. His theories suggest that megalithic structures, like the pyramids, were constructed using a numerological system to encode geographical coordinates.
Robert Louis Dressler was born on June 2, 1927, and raised during the Great Depression in rural Taney County, Missouri. Taney County is in the Ozark Mountains, a fiercely independent but poor people. His father, Mryl, was an electrician who farmed 30 acres of rocky ground to put food on the table. While cutting wood in 1937, Myrl’s electric saw kicked back and cut his arm, and he died four days later of a pulmonary embolism. So at the age of ten Bob (as he liked to be called) became the man of the family and helped to take care of his two younger sisters and mother. The family later moved to Inglewood, California, where his mother worked as a stenographer for an insurance company.
My work is to bring life back to degraded places on earth, through innovative nature-based solutions that integrate environmental restoration with economic regeneration, thus empowering individuals, communities, and businesses to harmonize with nature and foster lasting ecological balance.
William Edmond Gates (December 8, 1863 – April 24, 1940) was an American Mayanist. Most of his research focused around Mayan language hieroglyphs. He also collected Mesoamerican manuscripts. Gates studied Mayan based languages like Yucatec Maya, Ch'olti', Huastec and Q'eqchi'. Biographies state that he could speak at least 13 languages. Works and archives related to Gates reside in the collections of Brigham Young University.
Retired from lab research, I continue to develop the hypothesis that terrestrial fungi express a conserved intracellular protoplast phase as part of their endophytic life cycle within plants.
My interest in fungi evolved from a plant question: how and why numerous plant lineages independently evolved the ability to parasitize other plants via similar tumor-like structures called haustoria.
I considered the possibility that a common genetic denominator might be symbiotic microbes that facilitate their own transmission by influencing haustoria formation. However, ultrastructural studies failed to locate candidate microbes within the tumor-like tissues.
After graduating from the University of Arizona, Jim obtained a graduate degree in International Business at Thunderbird School of Global Management. Living and working abroad (Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East), Jim managed international fertilizer companies and experienced agricultural practices in a wide variety of climates and soils in both conventional and organic production.
He specializes in ways to control plant stress and to overcome salinity problems, and has written a number of articles for agricultural magazines and made special presentations to fertilizer producers and conventions on these topics. He has also spoken to government and private landscaping groups, regional water authorities, and urban farmers on the environmental benefits and water saving advantages of organics. Jim is fluent in Spanish.
Luther Burbank was an American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science. He developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants over his 55-year career. Burbank's developments included those of fruits, flowers, grains, grasses, and vegetables. He developed a spineless cactus and the plumcot.