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Premise Trichomes are hair‐like appendages extending from the plant epidermis. They serve many important biotic roles, including interference with herbivore movement. Characterizing the number, density, and distribution of trichomes can provide valuable insights on plant response to insect infestation and define the extent of plant defense capability. Automated trichome counting would speed up this research but poses several challenges, primarily because of the variability in coloration and the high occlusion of the trichomes. Methods and Results We developed a simplified method for image processing for automated and semi‐automated trichome counting. We illustrate this process using 30 leaves from 10 genotypes of soybean (Glycine max) differing in trichome abundance. We explored various heuristic image‐processing methods including thresholding and graph‐based algorithms to facilitate trichome counting. Of the two automated and two semi‐automated methods for trichome counting tested and with the help of regression analysis, the semi‐automated manually annotated trichome intersection curve method performed best, with an accuracy of close to 90% compared with the manually counted data. Conclusions We address trichome counting challenges including occlusion by combining image processing with human intervention to propose a semi‐automated method for trichome quantification. This provides new opportunities for the rapid and automated identification and quantification of trichomes, which has applications in a wide variety of disciplines.

The agent that should be used for light sedation of patients requiring mechanical ventilation is unclear. This randomized trial compared dexmedetomidine with propofol for the light sedation of critically ill patients with sepsis who required mechanical ventilation. No clinically important differences were found.

Loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services from agricultural lands remain important challenges in the United States despite decades of spending on natural resource management. To date, conservation investment has emphasized engineering practices or vegetative strategies centered on monocultural plantings of nonnative plants, largely excluding native species from cropland. In a catchment-scale experiment, we quantified the multiple effects of integrating strips of native prairie species amid corn and soybean crops, with prairie strips arranged to arrest run-off on slopes. Replacing 10% of cropland with prairie strips increased biodiversity and ecosystem services with minimal impacts on crop production. Compared with catchments containing only crops, integrating prairie strips into cropland led to greater catchment-level insect taxa richness (2.6-fold), pollinator abundance (3.5-fold), native bird species richness (2.1-fold), and abundance of bird species of greatest conservation need (2.1-fold). Use of prairie strips also reduced total water runoff from catchments by 37%, resulting in retention of 20 times more soil and 4.3 times more phosphorus. Corn and soybean yields for catchments with prairie strips decreased only by the amount of the area taken out of crop production. Social survey results indicated demand among both farming and nonfarming populations for the environmental outcomes produced by prairie strips. If federal and state policies were aligned to promote prairie strips, the practice would be applicable to 3.9 million ha of cropland in Iowa alone.

Sepsis, a condition characterized by immune dysregulation, is the leading cause of in-hospital mortality and requires rapid treatment. Assessing immune dysregulation has been challenging. The IntelliSep Index (ISI), a novel biomarker which leverages microfluidic deformability cytometry to assess immune activation, has been evaluated as a test for Emergency Department use but it is unclear how the signal evolves as patient condition evolves. In a 47-patient cohort with hospital stays ≤ 14 days, ISI provided a good indicator of disease progression by blinded physician review. ISI trends correlated with clinical improvement over time. During the first 12 h following presentation, ISI was unaffected by antibiotic treatment initiated in the emergency department (ED). After this period however, ISI values declined, reflecting the patient’s response to treatment, with Band 3 patients showing a 20% decline within the first two days of admission. ISI trends preceded Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score changes by two days. ISI also provided more stable and timely disease state assessments compared to traditional biomarkers (PCT, CRP, IL-6, and neutrophil elastase). Larger studies are needed to validate these findings and assess ISI’s clinical utility as a prognosticator of sepsis progression and treatment response.