Direct analysis in real time (DART) is a plasma-based ambient ionization technique that enables rapid ionization of small molecules with high sample throughput. In this work, DART was coupled to an orthogonal (oa) time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometer and the system was optimized for analyzing a vital hormonal regulator in insects, juvenile hormone (JH) III and its terpene precursors, namely, ...

We describe our experience with blowgun dart aspiration via an illustrative case series and review the resources available to teach children how to construct these objects. A 15-year-old boy presented with cough, wheeze, and eventually admitted to aspiration of a homemade blowgun dart. This instance heightened the awareness of our experience with blowgun dart aspiration as 3 cases presented wit...

The phenomenon of dart shooting in several species of land snails has still not been explained. We were interested in whether the dart can function as a nuptial gift of calcium, as previously proposed. Donating calcium would increase the fitness of the offspring and thereby result in a higher reproductive success for the donor. We confirmed in Helix aspersa that the developing embryo takes up c...

Several taxa of pulmonate land snails exhibit a conspicuous mating behaviour, the shooting of so-called love darts. During mating, such land snail species stab a mating partner with a mucus-coated dart. It has previously been shown that the sperm donor physiologically influences the sperm recipient via the mucus covering the dart and thereby decreases the number of sperm digested by the recipie...

A graph G is called a Berge graph if neither G nor its complement contains a chordless cycle whose length is odd and at least five; what we call a dart is the graph with vertices u, v, w, x, y and edges uv, vw, uy, vy, wy, xy; a graph is called dart-free if it has no induced subgraph isomorphic to the dart. We present a polynomial-time algorithm to recognize dart-free Berge graphs; this algorit...

Computed tomography is a noninvasive technique for reconstructing an object from projection data. If the object consists of only a few materials, discrete tomography allows us to use prior knowledge of the gray values corresponding to these materials to improve the accuracy of the reconstruction. The Discrete Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (DART) is a reconstruction algorithm for discrete t...

Large genome size and complexity hamper considerably the genomics research in relevant species. Rye (Secale cereale L.) has one of the largest genomes among cereal crops and repetitive sequences account for over 90% of its length. Diversity Arrays Technology is a high-throughput genotyping method, in which a preferential sampling of gene-rich regions is achieved through the use of methylation s...

BACKGROUND High-throughput tools for pan-genomic study, especially the DNA microarray platform, have sparked a remarkable increase in data production and enabled a shift in the scale at which biological investigation is possible. The use of microarrays to examine evolutionary relationships and processes, however, is predominantly restricted to model or near-model organisms. METHODOLOGY/PRINCI...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS The Difficult Airway Response Team (DART) was implemented in July 2008 to address emergent difficult airway situations. The main objective of this study was to highlight the unique role and skill set that otolaryngologists bring and their impact on patient outcomes. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective review of prospectively collected data from the hospital's airway registry. M...

this study aimed at examining the effect of different focus of attention instructions and cognitive styles on the learning of dart throwing skill. 80 children were randomly selected and divided into four equal groups: a) field independent-external attention, b) field independent-internal attention, c) field dependent-external attention and d) field independent-internal attention based on their ...