National Academy Science Letters最新文献

Soil water plays important role in soil–plant consortium in which plant absorbs from soil. Thus, soil acts as reservoir of water towards its proper growth. Sugarcane among the cash crop needs large quantity of water during its life-cycle. Hence, dynamics of water in soil were studied from two major sugarcane-based cropping pattern (intercropping and sole) at three depths at 15 cm interval (0–45 cm). The result invoked that soils were sandy-loam to sandy-clay-loam textured under different cropping system and depth. The increase in the clay content down the depth elevates the holding capacity of water via clogging the pore spaces under all the cropping system and depth. Therefore, the difference in behaviour is mainly attributed to the difference in cropping system only. Intercropping system showed high bulk density, low organic carbon, high clay:carbon ratio, high porosity and high E.C. compared to the sole sugarcane-based cropping system. The moisture dynamics under all cropping system behaved quadratically and attains minimum value. The other moisture parameter derived from the moisture loss curve indicates that intercropping has high moisture loss, high instaneous loss and low average moisture content.

Dhara Mustard Hybrid-11 (DMH-11), despite controversy surrounding its cultivation, became India’s first genetically modified (GM) food crop that could likely reach the kitchens. Existing studies often focus on the agronomic and environmental aspects of GM mustard, but there are notable gaps when it comes to quantitative impact evaluation. Against this backdrop, an attempt has been made for the ex-ante impact assessment of the GM mustard variety i.e., DMH-11, using the economic surplus model. The analysis was done for a decade starting from 2024 to 2034 in India. The contribution of this study is unique to the literature on GM food crops, as it provides insights into possible economic benefits to the farmers and consumers, as well as society as a whole, due to the adoption and cultivation of GM food crops. The analysis suggests a substantial total economic surplus of ₹6 lakh million by 2034, with a net present value of ₹2.72 lakh million, an internal rate of return of 264%, and a benefit–cost ratio of 353 on research cost, indicating very high returns on research investment on developing GM food crops.

Gait recognition enables non-intrusive identification of individuals through their walking patterns, eliminating the need for active cooperation. It has gained popularity due to its remote applicability and ability to work with low-resolution videos. This study explores the effectiveness of Scale-Invariant Feature Transform and Speeded-Up Robust Features for gait recognition. Decision Tree and Random Forest classifiers are employed to evaluate the recognition performance of these features, achieving accuracies of 85.20% and 87.80%, respectively, on the CASIA-A dataset.

To inventorize the bruchid species associated with stored edible leguminous seeds, eight different types of infested pulse seed / grain samples were collected from 21 locations spread across 10 districts of Tamil Nadu. Bruchids emerging from samples were collected and dry preserved. Morphological and male genitalia characterisation revealed the occurrence of five species of bruchid namely Callosobruchus maculatus (Fabricius), Callosobruchus chinensis Linnaeus, Callosobruchus analis Fabricius, Callosobruchus phaseoli Gyllenhall and Zabrotes subfasciatus Boheman. Among the five species, C. chinensis, C. phaseoli and Z. subfasciatus are first reports from Tamil Nadu. In C. maculatus, two forms namely flight and flightless forms were recorded. C. phaseoli and Z. subfasciatus were found only in lab lab and Horsegram seeds, respectively. Molecular characterisation was done for C. phaseoli. Descriptions, diagnostic keys, pictures of male, female insects, male genitalia and diagnostic characters are provided for all the five bruchid species. The findings of this study could be useful in framing management strategies particularly pheromone based bruchid management.

The research focuses on tackling challenges in increasing pothole leading to deteriorating road conditions. In reality, object detection faces various computational challenges at edge devices that includes model training, global server aggregation and data privacy. By leveraging federated learning within the FedCV framework, the system monitors, detects, and reports potholes. The novel aspect of research is the adaptation of the YOLOv8 object detection model, integrated with the FedCV framework, to ensure data privacy and security at the central server, while simultaneously boosting performance at the edge device during pothole detection training with local data. This integration addresses major computational challenges at the edge camera device level. As the research combines deep learning and federated learning within an edge-based framework, it improves real-time pothole detection and ensures efficient privacy-preserving road maintenance and advancing smart city initiatives. The model has demonstrated outstanding performance in classification, achieving an average accuracy of 96%. With a precision of 96.4%, recall of 96.7%, and an F1 score of 96.6%, its evaluation underscores its superiority compared to previous studies. These results establish the model as a reliable approach for pothole detection.

OTT services have transformed the entertainment industry by giving customers rapid access to various content. However, OTT platforms are plagued with churn or subscriber cancellations. This study investigates machine learning (ML) as a churn-reduction strategy. It investigates how machine learning (ML) algorithms might reduce churn and improve customer retention in the OTT arena. We study the usefulness of ensemble learning, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Multilayer Perceptron (MLPs) in detecting users on the verge of leaving. To solve intrinsic data imbalances in which churned users comprise a smaller minority, we employ SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Tech- nique). We investigate the impact of customer experience, content library, and consumption patterns on turnover likelihood. Our findings reveal that Gradi- ent Boosting (Accuracy: 87.2%), Random Forest (Accuracy: 91.2%), and MLP (Mean Accuracy: 87.1%) achieve strong performance, with SMOTE improving XGBoost’s recall by 697% (0.083 → 0.697), with LSTMs showing even more potential with additional data. This study highlights the potential of ML for OTT platforms to get important consumer information, design focused retention campaigns and eventually reduce churn. This results in long-term financial stability and a devoted subscription base.

A long and slender stylet is evolved in sucking groups of insects for an efficient tapping of phloem sap from host plants. Sucking groups of insects like aphid, mites cause a huge agricultural and horticultural yield loss globally. It is a long-standing debate whether aphid stylet penetration causes the stylet mediated injury to the host tissue or not. The aphid stylet is penetrated host tissue through rupturing mesophyll cells and reaches to phloem sap which is enriched with sucrose. During navigation of aphid stylet into phloem sieve element cell, numerous mesophyll cells are being ruptured. Till now, it is in the elusive zone that whether aphid stylet penetration induced host response or not against the stylet mediated injury. To configure the issue, the construct having bacterial UidA gene under the promoter of actin depolymerising factor 3 (AtADF3; At5g59880) was considered for raising transgenic of the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. The ADF3 promoter (pADF3) is a constitutive promoter which distinctly evidenced a physical injury mediated host response in the form of GUS staining at the site of physical injury without any changes in UidA, adf3 and tubulin RNA level. Thus, the hypothesis was whether aphid stylet penetration showed GUS staining from stylet mediated injury under ADF3 promoter or not. The result indicated that aphid stylet penetration mediated injury (mesophyll cell rupture) in host mesophyll did not induce GUS staining driven by ADF3 promoter at the stylet penetration site in Arabidopsis thaliana leaf. Therefore, it was proposed that aphid stylet penetration attenuated host response unlike physical injury and aphid may explore another mechanism to avert host response from stylet penetration mediated injury.