Multicenter Study of Needle-Free Blood Collection System for Reducing Specimen Error and Intravenous Catheter Replacement.

Inpatient hospital settings require access to high-quality blood specimens and durable peripheral intravenous (IV) catheters for patient care. The most common standard-of-care method for acquiring each blood specimen-venipuncture-often results in a non-negligible preanalytical error rate, patient discomfort, and tissue inflammation. In a 2-year, multicenter (23 hospitals) retrospective study, a novel blood collection system that collects blood specimens through existing inpatient IVs without a needle (PIVO, Velano Vascular) was compared with the current standard of care, in regards to its effect on specimen quality and IV catheter longevity.

Resistance of Selected Sorghum Genotypes to Maize Weevil (Coleoptera: Curculionidae).

The maize weevil, Sitophilus zeamais (Motschulsky) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), is a major insect pest of stored grain. This study evaluated resistance of grain of 26 sorghum genotypes, Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench, to maize weevil under laboratory conditions.

Evolutionary drivers of mast-seeding in a long-lived desert shrub.

Premise Of The Study: The evolutionary drivers and proximal regulators of mast-seeding are well understood for species of mesic environments, but how these regulators interact with high spatial and interannual variability in growing-season precipitation for a masting species in a desert environment has never been examined.

Method: We followed flowering and seed production in 16 populations of the North American desert shrub blackbrush (Coleogyne ramosissima) from contrasting environments across its range over an 11-year period to determine patterns of interannual reproductive output variation.

Key Result: Patterns of reproductive output in blackbrush did not track current growing season precipitation, but instead were regulated by prior-year weather cues.

Sequential sampling for panicle caterpillars (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) in sorghum.

Panicle caterpillars comprise an economically important insect pest complex of sorghum throughout the Great Plains of the United States, particularly in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The sorghum panicle caterpillar complex consists of larvae of two polyphagous lepidopteran species: the corn earworm, Helicoverpa zea (Boddie), and fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E.