Category Archives: Transhuman News

The 21st century has already brought us some pretty amazing and powerful inventions and innovations: robotics, cloning and genetic engineering to name a few. But from the day-to-day perspective for most individuals and businesses, wed be remiss not to talk about the profound impact of social media.

Social media networks can add an awesome dimension to customer, employee and investor relations. Whether youre leveraging Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest or YouTube, social media can add and link customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders to your business every second of every day. This potential for accelerated access to your customers and investors is an impelling reason to make social media a priority for your Board. Here are some ways to make that happen.

Listen. Engage. Persuade.

As one former digital activist told us, Whether you like it or not, people out there on social media are talking about you, reading about you and making up their minds about you []. If you are not part of these conversations, guess whos in charge of public perception and brand reputation? The consumers you have angered, your competitors and the activists that hate you.

Tracking social media conversations allows a company to understand which topics are provoking discussions. It also allows them to intervene when needed to sway the discourse in their favor. The best way to mitigate reputational risk is by monitoring social media chatter and ensuring your company is well placed to respond rapidly. Organizations should listen, engage and persuade in that order and quickly.

Opportunities often remain underexploited

Companies active in social media conversations often lead the way with customers and employees. These companies dont only turn to social media when things go wrong but regularly engage with customers and use these outlets to build loyalty. Benefits of using social media may include generation of revenue growth through better targeting and reduction of costs by elimination of less-effective advertising.

Many audit committee chairs remain skeptical of the benefits of employee usage of social media. However, research indicates that employees trained on the proper use of social media channels actually become highly effective ambassadors for their companies.

In addition, with investors and analysts increasingly drawn to social media for both communication and research purposes, investor relations departments have found social media to be an effective communications channel. A 2012 survey revealed that 32% of western European companies use at least one form of social media to communicate with investment professionals.

Boards should take an active oversight role

Excerpt from:
EYVoice: Tweet It, Link It, 'Book It: Social Media And The Board

Guy Calaf/Polaris/eyevine

Loss of crops to drought contributed to a food crisis in Ethiopia in 2008.

Old-fashioned breeding techniques seem to be leading genetic modification in a race to develop crops that can withstand drought and poor soils.

As the climate warms and rainfall becomes more erratic, farmers worldwide will increasingly need crops that can thrive in drought conditions. And the high costs of fertilizers along with the environmental damage they can cause are also pushing farmers to look for crop varieties that can do more with less.

The need for tougher crops is especially acute in Africa, where drought can reduce maize (corn) yields by up to 25%. The Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa project, which launched in 2006 with US$33 million, has developed 153 new varieties to improve yields in 13 countries. In field trials, these varieties match or exceed the yields from commercial seeds under good rainfall conditions, and yield up to 30% more under drought conditions.

An analysis published earlier this year reported that by the projects end in 2016, the extra yields from drought-tolerant maize could help to reduce the number of people living in poverty in the 13 countries by up to 9% (R.LaRovere et al. J. Dev. Areas 48(1), 199225; 2014). In Zimbabwe alone, that effect would reach more than half a million people.

The projects success is due in large part to its access to a large seed bank managed by one of its partners, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico City. Breeders from CIMMYT and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, Nigeria, searched the collection for maize varieties that thrive in water-scarce regions. The researchers cross-bred these varieties and then mated the most drought-tolerant of their offspring. Several cycles of this process led to seed that was better adapted to water-scarce conditions. In a final step, project scientists cross-bred these plants with varieties that have been successful in Africa.

It is a painstaking and expensive process, says Kevin Pixley, director of CIMMYTs genetic resources programme.

The CIMMYT researchers established that certain characteristics predict how a maize plant will fare in drought. One of the most telling is the number of days between when the plants male organs shed pollen and when the female silks emerge. When water is scarce, the silks emerge late. If the delay is long enough, they emerge after the plants have released their pollen and are not fertilized.

Finding out this relationship was very important to be able to select for drought tolerance, says Pixley. By favouring plants with shorter intervals between pollen release and silk emergence, breeders were able to produce maize that was more resistant to drought.

See the rest here:
Cross-bred crops get fit faster