Drought stress has severely hampered maize production, affecting the livelihood and economics of millions of people worldwide. In the future, as a result of climate change, unpredictable weather events will become more frequent hence the implementation of adaptive strategies will be inevitable. Through utilizing different genetic and breeding approaches, efforts are in progress to develop the drought tolerance in maize. The recent approaches of genomics-assisted breeding, transcriptomics, proteomics, transgenics, and genome editing have fast-tracked enhancement for drought stress tolerance under laboratory and field conditions. Drought stress tolerance in maize could be considerably improved by combining omics technologies with novel breeding methods and high-throughput phenotyping (HTP). This review focuses on maize responses against drought, as well as novel breeding and system biology approaches applied to better understand drought tolerance mechanisms and the development of drought-tolerant maize cultivars. Researchers must disentangle the molecular and physiological bases of drought tolerance features in order to increase maize yield. Therefore, the integrated investments in field-based HTP, system biology, and sophisticated breeding methodologies are expected to help increase and stabilize maize production in the face of climate change.
Media multitasking, a simultaneous consumption of two or more media, is a ubiquitous and popular behaviour among the youth. One of the reasons for its increasing growth is the structural/market-level factors (known as media factors). Although India is a growing technology hub, there have been limited efforts to identify the media multitasking behaviour among the youth in this country. Thus, this study attempts to analyse the prevalence of media multitasking behaviour among the Indian college students and its relationship with their emotions through two methods: self-report and an android-based application known as ‘Affective Media Landscape Survey’ (AMLS). Previous studies have reported that continuous interaction with media diminishes face-to-face interaction, reduces empathy and increases the tendency to live in the virtual world. This raises the concern for emotional differences in everyday life, if any, between the high and low groups of media multitaskers. So the second objective of the study is to understand the emotional profile of the users that varies among media multitasking index. To achieve these objectives, the same two methods, the ‘self-report’ that involves questionnaires and AMLS (an android-based app to study the frequency of media multitasking behaviour and the emotions of the users) have been employed. The study gives an insight into the emerging behavioural patterns and hence is helpful for designing communities to cater to the growing needs of the young media users.
COVID-19 is an infectious disease that has widened the gap between victims and non-victims in society. Understanding how individuals support and assist COVID-19 sufferers in a pandemic crisis is critical. Thus, this study aims to qualitatively evaluate the prosocial intention and types of prosocial behavior toward COVID-19 victims by low socioeconomic individuals from India and Indonesia’s collectivistic societies. We conducted semi-structured and in-depth interviews during the lockdown from March to May 2020, via phone and in-person, using a purposive selection of respondents (total n = 50). The data were analyzed using the qualitative synthesis method. Five themes were discovered: 1) too scared to help, 2) love to help but scared: moral dilemma, 3) informing authority who knows how to handle, 4) caring, sharing, and supporting, but with a distance, and 5) helping at one’s personal health risk. This study highlights that prosocial intentions range from minor acts of kindness to self-harm and out-of-bounds acts of kindness for COVID-19 victims.
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