The study, led by Alemka Tomicic and Javiera Duarte of Diego Portales University together with colleagues from the Fundación Círculo Polar, set out to understand how these groups are perceived by the people who take part in them: what benefits they deliver, what conditions allow them to function well, and what challenges they face. Rather than measuring outcomes with scales and statistics, the researchers turned to in-depth semi-structured interviews with 17 participants—7 peer supporters and 10 peer participants—capturing the texture of lived experience that quantitative trials often miss.

Methodologically, the team anchored its analysis in Constructivist Grounded Theory, an approach that treats knowledge as co-constructed between researchers and participants rather than simply extracted from them. Interview transcripts were coded iteratively, with categories emerging from the data itself, and the research team performed intersubjective validation, comparing interpretations across analysts to guard against individual bias. This rigorous qualitative machinery matters because the study’s central claim—that peer groups lower the barrier of isolation through relational safety and peer-driven meaning-making—rests on the credibility of how those accounts were gathered and interpreted.

Three main analytical categories emerged from the data. The first concerned the benefits of participating in the CAPs, which participants described as spaces of genuine emotional connection, mutual recognition, and practical learning about living with the condition. The second identified the conditions that enable the groups to work effectively, including trust, shared language, and the legitimacy that comes from being facilitated by people who have themselves navigated bipolar disorder. The third mapped the challenges and limitations the circles confront, from sustaining momentum over time to the fragility of initiatives that depend heavily on volunteer energy and community goodwill.

The central phenomenon that crystallized across interviews was the groups’ capacity to dissolve isolation. Participants repeatedly described the revelation of discovering others who truly understood their experience—an epiphany captured in the study’s title, drawn from the sentiment of realizing “I’m not the only one.” In clinical terms, the researchers interpret this as relational safety: an environment in which disclosure does not carry the risk of judgment, and where the ordinary anxieties of explaining one’s moods, medications, and hospitalizations to a skeptical world simply fall away.

Beyond emotional relief, the study found that the CAPs operate as engines of identity reconstruction. Participants described moving from a self-concept organized around illness and deficit toward one organized around agency and shared experience. Notably, the community organization uses the Spanish term conscientes—roughly, “those who are aware”—to describe participants, deliberately contrasting it with “patients” to emphasize self-knowledge and active participation rather than passive receipt of care. The researchers acknowledge that this term carries cultural and symbolic weight that resists direct translation into English, but its spirit permeates the findings: the circles are not merely support groups but platforms for rebuilding a self and re-entering community life.

The findings arrive amid a growing international evidence base for peer support in mental health. Systematic reviews, including a 2024 umbrella review in BMC Medicine, have documented the effectiveness, implementation challenges, and lived experiences of peer support approaches across mental health conditions, and the World Health Organization has issued guidance supporting peer support groups run by and for people with lived experience. Yet bipolar disorder presents specific challenges—cyclical mood episodes, stigma that can be internalized as self-stigma, and social withdrawal during both depressive and manic phases—that make the Chilean findings particularly relevant. Prior research has shown that stigma surrounding bipolar disorder is pervasive and that self-stigma can be as damaging as public discrimination, eroding self-efficacy and discouraging help-seeking.

What makes the Chilean model distinctive is its community grounding. The CAPs emerged not from a hospital or a ministry directive but from a community-based organization working alongside people with the diagnosis, and the study itself was a collaboration between academic researchers and the foundation’s own members. The authors are careful about this proximity: several co-authors are affiliated with the organization where the study took place, so the research process was overseen by lead investigators unaffiliated with the foundation and independently supported by the Millennium Institute for Research on Depression and Personality, a non-profit consortium of Chilean universities. That governance structure was designed to protect the neutrality of the analysis while preserving the intimate access that community-embedded research makes possible.

The study’s implications reach into health policy. In Chile, where psychiatric epidemiological studies have documented substantial prevalence of mental disorders and where hospitalizations for bipolar affective disorder have drawn recent attention, peer-led models offer a complementary layer to pharmacological treatment and psychotherapy rather than a replacement for them. The authors argue that such models advance recovery-oriented care—a framework, originating in the psychosocial rehabilitation literature of the 1990s, that defines recovery not as symptom elimination but as a meaningful life lived with or despite a condition. But they also stress that peer initiatives cannot thrive on passion alone: institutional support, stable funding, and formal recognition are essential to sustain the circles and maximize their impact.

The limitations of the study are those inherent to its design. Qualitative research with 17 participants in a single community organization cannot claim statistical generalizability, and the sensitive nature of the data—protected by informed consent and ethical approval for this specific project—means the underlying interviews cannot be shared publicly. Yet the strength of the approach lies precisely in its depth: by tracing how relational safety, shared meaning-making, and identity work unfold inside the circles, the study offers clinicians, policymakers, and peer organizations a detailed map of why peer support works when it works, and what it needs to keep working. For the people in the circles, the message is simpler and more human. In a condition that so often convinces its sufferers that they are alone, the discovery that they are not may be the most powerful therapeutic agent of all.

Subject of Research: Peer support groups for people with bipolar disorder in Chile

Article Title: “I’m Not the Only One”: A Qualitative Study on the Experiences of Peer Support for Bipolar Disorder in Chile

Article References: Tomicic, A., Duarte, J., Valenzuela, M. J., Verni, M., Lima, B., Herrera, I., Encina, F., Gal, F., & Valenzuela, R. (2026). “I’m Not the Only One”: A Qualitative Study on the Experiences of Peer Support for Bipolar Disorder in Chile. Community Mental Health Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-026-01718-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10597-026-01718-2

Keywords: bipolar disorder, peer support, mental health, psychosocial recovery, grounded theory, community intervention, Chile, stigma, qualitative research, social isolation, recovery-oriented care, Only

The answer, published in the journal Regional Environmental Change, is a study in contrasts. The kelp itself, it turns out, is still there, in densities that statistically match those recorded more than five decades earlier. But the living community woven around those forests has been quietly rewritten. An invasive sea anemone that did not exist in Patagonian waters in 1972 now smothers hard surfaces across sheltered sites, covering up to 88.4 percent of the seafloor in places. The region’s commercially harvested sea urchin has crashed by as much as 90 percent, its remaining individuals measurably smaller than their ancestors. And one widespread, long-lived urchin species appears to have vanished almost entirely from the study region.

The comparison is possible because of an extraordinary scientific legacy. In 1972, ecologist Paul Dayton sailed aboard the research vessel Hero as part of one of the first quantitative expeditions to describe kelp forest ecology across the breadth of Patagonia. His work, published in the mid-1980s, established the region’s forests as functionally unique—shaped by exposure gradients and largely free of the human disturbance that had transformed kelp ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere. Dayton’s coordinates, transect designs and written descriptions became a frozen snapshot of a baseline world. In February 2026, a team led by Albert Pessarrodona of the University of Western Australia, working with Rewilding Chile’s Patagonian Megatransect initiative, relocated five of those original forests and replicated the historical sampling with remarkable fidelity, laying the same 25-meter transects along the same isobaths in the shallow subtidal zone.

The expedition surveyed twelve sites in total, spanning a dramatic environmental gradient that begins inside the Aysén fjord, threads through the channel networks of the Chonos Archipelago, and ends at fully wave-exposed oceanic islands. At each site, divers counted and measured kelp holdfasts—the root-like anchors of the plants—while a second diver tallied every mobile invertebrate larger than 2.5 centimeters. Kelp were classified into recruits, juveniles and adults using the same holdfast-diameter criteria Dayton had applied. Herbivore densities were quantified across three depth strata using quadrats, and the cover of every sessile organism was estimated with point-intercept methods. The statistical machinery brought to bear on the comparison was thoroughly modern: generalized linear mixed models with Gamma and Tweedie distributions, site treated as a random effect, and a 5,000-resample bootstrap to generate empirical confidence intervals where historical raw data were incomplete.

The headline finding on the kelp itself was reassurance. Adult giant kelp densities did not differ significantly between 1972 and 2026, and the community patterns across the fjord-to-ocean gradient closely matched the historical descriptions. At offshore sites, the dynamics remained what ecologists call top-down: grazing by the red sea urchin Loxechinus albus, the dominant herbivore by biomass, shapes where kelp can persist, carving urchin barrens at depth and confining forests to shallow boulder tops where wave exposure limits urchin access. Toward the sheltered inner fjord, the rules change. There, abiotic stress—freshwater runoff, low salinity, summer nutrient depletion—suppresses kelp growth, producing stunted, dwarfed plants barely three meters long, and non-consumptive interactions such as competition for space take center stage. The fjord’s shallow surface layer, with salinity dipping as low as 0.6 practical salinity units, excludes grazers that cannot tolerate the brackish conditions, so forests exist near the fjord head entirely devoid of herbivores.

Yet the apparent stability of the kelp itself conceals a subtler warning. Mean adult holdfast diameter was significantly larger in 2026—21.6 centimeters versus 13.6 in 1972—suggesting that today’s forests are dominated by older cohorts, a demographic signature that in other regions has preceded collapse. Recruit densities, meanwhile, were higher in the historical surveys, though the authors caution this likely reflects seasonal timing differences between the November historical sampling and their February expedition rather than a genuine decadal decline in reproduction. In the sheltered inner fjord, kelp populations run on an annual or semi-annual cycle, vanishing each late summer and persisting through a microscopic phase, an adaptation to the nutrient-poor, stratified waters that follow summer warming. Offshore, bathed in nutrient-rich subantarctic water, populations are perennial and reproduce year-round. These life-history differences, the study argues, reveal the fundamental role of geomorphology and oceanography in structuring the entire ecosystem.

The clearest footprints of global change appeared in the animals living among the kelp. Loxechinus albus, the target of the world’s largest sea urchin fishery—roughly 30,000 tons per year in the Aysén region alone—declined by 59 to 90 percent across the depths examined at the historical sites. Depth-specific averages that once ranged from 0.6 to 101 individuals per square meter in 1972 now span just 0.8 to 20. Maximum body sizes have shrunk from more than 10 centimeters to 7.5, a pattern classically associated with intense fishing pressure that removes the largest, oldest individuals. Independent stock assessments indicate standing stocks have fallen 45 to 51 percent since the late 1990s, and the bootstrapping analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of historical density values—between 80 and 94 percent depending on depth—fell outside the contemporary range of variation. Intriguingly, the surveys suggest offshore kelp forests may now be more extensive than Dayton reported, plausibly because reduced urchin grazing has loosened the top-down control that once constrained them—a cascade with consequences no one yet fully understands.

Equally striking is the fate of Pseudechinus magellanicus, a small, long-lived, opportunistic urchin that was ubiquitous in the 1970s at average densities of 1.7 to 30.1 individuals per square meter. In 2026, it was recorded at only four of twelve sites, at densities of essentially zero. Because this species is not commercially harvested, the mechanism behind its disappearance remains a mystery, though the researchers speculate that reduced recruitment—or populations living at the edge of their geographic range—may be involved. Its functional role, grazing on drifting kelp fragments from cryptic refuges in holdfasts and crevices, may already be quietly absent from the system.

Then there is the anemone. Metridium senile, a plumose filter-feeder native to the North Atlantic and North Pacific, first appeared in Chilean Patagonia in 2005. Two decades later, it is common at all but three of the surveyed sites, colonizing gravel, kelp fronds and even the surfaces of mobile invertebrates, and reaching peak cover in the sheltered channels and inner fjord. Its distribution appears governed by physics: oscillatory wave turbulence at exposed sites deforms its tentacle crown and cripples its feeding efficiency, while the low-salinity surface layer of the Aysén fjord falls below its known tolerance of roughly 15 to 37.5 practical salinity units, excluding it from the shallowest inner-fjord habitats. Where conditions suit it, however, it dominates—likely competing with native filter feeders including mussels, barnacles and a rich diversity of indigenous anemones. The study found no simple relationship between anemone cover and kelp recruitment or urchin density, but the authors warn that impacts may be most severe in the annual, sheltered kelp populations that depend on microscopic life stages to persist, and they flag potential effects on commercially important resources.

The broader lesson is one that marine ecologists have learned repeatedly around the world: the canopy can look intact while the forest’s inner machinery is being dismantled. Patagonia’s kelp forests have persisted through five decades of intensifying pressures—industrial fisheries, the explosive expansion of salmon aquaculture, marine invasions, and increasingly extreme climatic events—and the region’s relative climatic stability has likely buffered them from the declines seen elsewhere. But persistence of the foundation species is not the same as health of the ecosystem. The authors argue that protecting these globally significant forests will require conserving not just the kelp itself, but the ecological processes, connectivity and environmental conditions that underpin their resilience. In a region where long-term monitoring has been nearly impossible due to sheer remoteness, this rare half-century resurvey delivers both reassurance and alarm: the forests are still standing, but the fingerprints of the Anthropocene are now pressed firmly into every square meter of the seafloor beneath them.

Subject of Research: Long-term ecological change in Patagonian giant kelp forests assessed by resurveying sites first studied in 1972

Article Title: Footprints of global change in Patagonian kelp forests after half a century

Article References: Pessarrodona, A., Palacios, M., Kaminsky, J., Mora-Soto, A., Dayton, P. K., & Hüne, M. (2026). Footprints of global change in Patagonian kelp forests after half a century. Regional Environmental Change, 26(4), Article 194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02680-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02680-1

Keywords: giant kelp, Macrocystis pyrifera, Patagonia, kelp forests, sea urchins, invasive species, Metridium senile, Loxechinus albus, Chile, fjords, marine conservation, historical ecology

Substance use disorders represent one of the most formidable public health burdens in the Americas, where they stand as the leading cause of premature death and disability. The scale of the problem is stark: substance use is implicated in a substantial share of deaths among the world’s adult population, and effective treatment remains one of the most powerful tools available for reducing that toll. Yet treatment only works if people stay in it. Dropout is a persistent and corrosive weakness across virtually every model of addiction care, shortening exposure to interventions, undermining therapeutic momentum, and returning patients to the very environments that may have fueled their substance use in the first place. Understanding who drops out, and when, has therefore become a central question for researchers and clinicians alike.

The new research, published in Addiction Science & Clinical Practice, turned to an unusually rich source of evidence: Chile’s national registry of patients receiving publicly funded treatment for substance use disorders between 2010 and 2019. The investigators focused on emerging adults, those aged 18 to 29, a developmental window marked by instability, identity formation, and heightened vulnerability to both substance use and treatment disengagement. From the registry they assembled a retrospective cohort of 23,979 young adults and classified each person’s living arrangement at the moment they entered treatment into three categories: living alone, living with family of origin, or living with a partner and children. The question was deceptively simple. Did the shape of a patient’s household predict how long they stayed in treatment?

Answering it rigorously required sophisticated statistical machinery. People who live alone are not randomly different from those who live with family; they may differ in age, severity of addiction, employment, education, mental health, and a host of other characteristics that independently influence retention. To disentangle these threads, the researchers used inverse probability of treatment weighting, a technique built on multinomial logistic propensity scores that statistically balances the comparison groups on observed baseline differences. Survival analysis methods, including weighted Kaplan–Meier estimation, were then applied to track how the probability of remaining in treatment evolved over time. The team also computed the restricted mean survival time, a measure that captures the average duration of retention within a defined window and offers an intuitive summary of the survival curves that complements traditional hazard-based approaches.

Crucially, the analysis was stratified by treatment setting, separating outpatient programs from inpatient and residential care, because the two environments place very different demands on patients. The results painted a consistent picture. Young adults living with their family of origin or with a partner and children had a higher probability of remaining in treatment than those living alone, and the gap was widest in inpatient programs. At six months, the probability of still being in treatment was 0.54 for those living with family of origin and 0.57 for those living with a partner or children, compared with just 0.41 for those living alone. At twelve months, the pattern held: 0.43 and 0.44 for the cohabiting groups against 0.33 for those living solo. In other words, nearly six in ten socially connected patients were still engaged at the six-month mark in inpatient care, while fewer than half of those living alone remained.

The restricted mean survival time analysis reinforced the message. Among inpatient participants, the one-year RMST reached 0.60 for those living with family of origin and 0.62 for those living with a partner or children, but only 0.49 for those living alone, a retention gap that translates into weeks of additional engagement over the first year of care. Notably, the two cohabiting groups did not differ from each other in the inpatient setting; whether the anchor was parents, siblings, or one’s own partner and children, the protective effect of shared living appeared comparable. Outpatient programs told a subtler story. There, the differences between living arrangements were modest, and the most consistent contrast emerged between those living with family of origin and those living with a partner and children, suggesting that the protective architecture of the household may interact with the intensity and structure of the treatment modality itself.

Why would a shared household buffer against dropout? The authors point to the central role of social bonds. Family members and partners can provide practical scaffolding, transportation to appointments, reminders, financial support, a stable place to sleep, as well as emotional accountability, the diffuse but powerful sense that someone notices when you fail to show up. For emerging adults, whose ties to education, employment, and institutions are often still fragile, these bonds may carry particular weight. Residential and inpatient treatment, which requires a deliberate withdrawal from daily life, may be especially difficult to sustain without a household invested in one’s return and recovery. Conversely, young adults living alone may face treatment environments that inadvertently ask them to be their own support system, a demand that substance use disorders themselves make harder to meet.

The study’s implications reach well beyond Chile. Many national treatment systems, including those in high-income countries, collect detailed clinical data on substance use severity, psychiatric comorbidity, and treatment modality, yet rarely capture living arrangements as a structured variable at intake. This research suggests that a single intake question, who do you live with, could help identify patients at elevated risk of early disengagement and trigger targeted supports, from peer outreach and case management to deliberate family involvement in treatment planning. The findings also resonate with systems and family therapy traditions that view addiction not merely as an individual pathology but as a condition embedded in relational networks. Interventions that strengthen those networks, or that compensate for their absence, may hold untapped value for the youngest and most precarious patients.

Certain caveats deserve emphasis. As a retrospective cohort study, the analysis can establish association but not causation; unmeasured characteristics, such as motivation for recovery, quality of family relationships, or neighborhood context, could partly explain the observed differences. Living arrangements were assessed at treatment entry and may have changed during follow-up. The study also examined public-sector treatment in a single country, and Chile’s specific service configuration may shape how household context interacts with care. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the cohort, the decade-long observation window, and the rigor of the statistical design give the findings unusual credibility for observational research in this field, and Chile’s advanced monitoring infrastructure makes the dataset one of the strongest of its kind in Latin America.

The broader lesson is one that clinicians and policymakers are increasingly being asked to internalize: recovery is not enacted in a vacuum. For young adults, the developmental crucible in which identities, careers, and relationships are forged, the presence of a stable relational anchor may be the difference between a treatment episode that endures and one that dissolves within months. As the authors conclude, effective strategies for substance use disorders must take social support into account, recognizing the potential positive impact of familial and relational bonds during the critical phase of emerging adulthood. In a decade of data from nearly 24,000 patients, the signal is difficult to ignore: the people waiting at home may be among the most powerful, and least expensive, therapeutic assets a treatment system has.

Subject of Research: The association between living arrangements and time to dropout from substance use disorder treatment among emerging adults in Chile.

Article Title: Association between living arrangements and time to drop out in patients between 18 and 29 years of age, under treatment for substance abuse disorders in Chile, 2010–2019

Article References: Association between living arrangements and time to drop out in patients between 18 and 29 years of age, under treatment for substance abuse disorders in Chile, 2010–2019. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13722-026-00721-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13722-026-00721-y

Keywords: substance use disorders, treatment dropout, living arrangements, emerging adults, treatment retention, social support, inpatient treatment, outpatient treatment, Chile, survival analysis, family bonds, public health

The platform, known as MoDeRa-Ts, short for Decision Support Model for Enhancing Community Resilience in Tsunami-Prone Cities, was developed by Paula Villagra-Islas of the Universidad Austral de Chile and her collaborators, including Cristian Olivares-Rodriguez and Rafael Aránguiz. Its purpose is ambitious: to simulate community resilience across multiple dimensions—physical, social, institutional, and economic—under different tsunami inundation scenarios, and to help urban planners and municipal policymakers move from abstract risk maps to actionable strategies. The research team deliberately set out to answer a question that plagues the rapidly growing field of resilience-assessment tools: do these digital platforms actually work for the people expected to use them?

The literature suggests many do not. Over the past decade, dozens of indices, dashboards, and geographic information system tools have been proposed for measuring community disaster resilience, from composite indicator frameworks to co-created GIS dashboards. Reviews of these tools repeatedly flag the same weakness: a lack of validation with end users. Tools are often built by researchers, demonstrated at conferences, and then quietly abandoned because planners find them confusing, irrelevant, or disconnected from the practical constraints of municipal budgeting and land-use regulation. Villagra-Islas and her colleagues argue that without usability and utility testing, even the most technically elegant simulation platform risks becoming a digital orphan.

To test MoDeRa-Ts under realistic conditions, the researchers organized focus groups with 72 municipal officials drawn from nine representative coastal cities across Chile. These were not students or volunteer panels; they were the professionals responsible for planning, emergency management, and community development in towns where a major tsunami could strike within minutes of a megathrust earthquake. Participants worked with the platform in a controlled environment, completing structured activities that asked them to simulate resilience scenarios, evaluate the tool itself, and explore whether its outputs could be transformed into concrete planning strategies for their own municipalities.

The evaluation followed established, quantitative benchmarks. Usability was measured with the System Usability Scale, a widely used ten-item instrument scored from 0 to 100, in which scores of 68 or higher indicate acceptable usability. MoDeRa-Ts achieved a mean score of 69 out of 100—just above the acceptance threshold. Officials found the platform usable, but they consistently identified the need for a simpler interface, suggesting that the tool’s analytical depth came at some cost in navigability. The researchers treat this result not as a failure but as exactly the kind of actionable feedback that validation exercises are meant to produce: the science inside the platform works, but the packaging needs refinement before broad deployment.

Utility, by contrast, scored strikingly higher. Using the Evaluation Framework for Learning Analytics, a four-level instrument in which items are rated on a 1-to-10 scale and normalized scores above 70 indicate acceptability, MoDeRa-Ts received ratings ranging from 81 to 86 out of 100. Participants reported that the platform effectively helped them understand the information presented, reflect on the multidimensional nature of their communities’ resilience, and identify potential interventions. In other words, the platform did more than display data—it changed how officials thought about vulnerability in their cities, prompting them to consider social and institutional dimensions alongside the physical footprint of tsunami inundation.

The most consequential result emerged from that reflection. Through their interaction with the simulations, the 72 participants collectively identified 45 distinct planning strategies for strengthening tsunami resilience in Chilean coastal cities. The research team organized these strategies into ten Resilient Strategic Planning Themes, covering areas such as evacuation infrastructure, land-use controls in inundation zones, critical facility protection, and community preparedness. This is the step where most simulation tools stall: they can model scenarios elegantly, but converting model output into a portfolio of place-specific interventions requires domain knowledge, local context, and deliberation. The focus-group design appears to have supplied all three, turning the platform into a catalyst for genuine planning dialogue rather than a passive display.

The methodological rigor of the study deserves attention in its own right. Quantitative survey data were analyzed in SPSS, while qualitative responses were coded in Atlas.ti, allowing the team to combine statistical benchmarks with rich thematic analysis. The mixed-methods approach, the authors argue, is essential for evaluating emerging decision-support tools: a high usability score alone would say nothing about whether a tool is useful, and strong perceived utility would mean little if the interface frustrated every user who touched it. By measuring both dimensions with validated instruments, the study offers a template that other developers of resilience platforms—whether for floods, earthquakes, or wildfires—could readily adopt.

The stakes in Chile could hardly be higher. The country’s history is punctuated by catastrophic tsunamis, including the 1960 Valdivia event, the largest earthquake ever recorded, and the 2010 Maule earthquake and tsunami that killed hundreds. Recent research by the same team and collaborators has produced a new generation of probabilistic tsunami inundation maps for Chilean cities, and national agencies have invested in platforms for seismic and evacuation analysis. MoDeRa-Ts is designed to sit downstream of such hazard science, integrating inundation scenarios with resilience indicators so that a planner in a mid-sized port town can see not only how deep the water might run, but how the social fabric, economy, and institutions of the community would absorb and recover from the shock.

What happens next will determine whether the platform moves from validated research to national practice. The findings suggest a clear roadmap: simplify the interface while preserving the analytical engine, embed the tool within the planning workflows of Chile’s national disaster-prevention service and municipal governments, and extend the validation approach to more cities and user groups. If that transition succeeds, the study’s broader lesson will resonate far beyond Chile. In an era when coastal urbanization is accelerating worldwide and climate-driven hazards are intensifying, the bottleneck in disaster resilience is often not the science of simulation but the human science of adoption. By submitting their platform to skeptical scrutiny from the officials who matter most, the researchers have shown how decision-support technology can earn its way out of the laboratory and into the rooms where city futures are decided.

Subject of Research: Validation of a decision-support platform for tsunami-resilient coastal city planning

Article Title: From simulation to urban action: evaluating a decision-support platform for tsunami-resilient coastal cities

Article References: Villagra-Islas, P., Olivares-Rodriguez, C., & Aránguiz, R. (2026). From simulation to urban action: evaluating a decision-support platform for tsunami-resilient coastal cities. Natural Hazards, 122(19), Article 642. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-026-08410-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-026-08410-4

Keywords: tsunami, community resilience, decision support, Chile, coastal cities, urban planning, usability, System Usability Scale, disaster risk reduction, simulation, urban, action

The study’s central insight is that resistance is not a single phenomenon but a differentiated set of practices whose viability depends on where a scholar sits within the intersecting structures of institutional type, career stage, gender, and disciplinary tradition. The researchers identify three distinct modalities. The first, dispositional resistance, is exercised by senior academics in traditional public universities who block technocratic intrusion through institutional mediation. The second, tactical resistance, is expressed in slow tempo, informal collaborative networks, and thematic subversion that reorganize practice without directly disputing the managerial regime. The third, individual coping, describes how precarious and early-career scholars sustain their professional identity through irony and selective compliance, with no effect on institutional structure. Each modality tells a different story about power, voice, and the limits of commensuration in relational fields.

Dispositional resistance is the most structurally powerful of the three. In Chile’s traditional public universities, senior academics occupy positions from which they can mediate between managerial demands and disciplinary practice, effectively filtering or blocking the intrusion of standardized indicators into the everyday work of community engagement. These scholars draw on long-established professional dispositions and on institutional arrangements that give them a voice in how engagement is defined and evaluated. Their resistance does not take the form of open rebellion; rather, it operates through committees, accreditation processes, and informal authority, ensuring that the metric infrastructure never fully penetrates the core of academic practice. The study suggests that this is why the academic field retains its internal hierarchies in such institutions: the managerial regime is present, but it is held at arm’s length by those with the standing to contest it.

Tactical resistance, by contrast, works within the system while quietly reordering it. Academics adopting this modality slow the tempo of their work, refusing the accelerated rhythms that quantification regimes demand, and build informal collaborative networks that operate beneath the radar of official reporting. They also engage in thematic subversion, reframing the categories through which engagement is counted so that the substance of their community work survives even as its surface is rendered legible to administrators. Crucially, this form of resistance does not dispute the legitimacy of the managerial regime itself. It accepts the existence of indicators while hollowing out their capacity to dictate practice. The researchers found this modality distributed across institutional types, but its character shifted with context: where institutional cultures were more corporate, tactical resistance became subtler and more defensive.

The third modality, individual coping, is the most sobering finding of the study. Precarious and early-career scholars, along with many women academics navigating the gendered organization of academic labour, lack the institutional standing to block or bend the metric regime. Their resistance contracts to subaltern irony: dark humour about the absurdity of counting relationships, selective compliance that protects what matters most to them, and private narratives that preserve a professional identity the institution no longer recognizes. The study is explicit that these coping strategies have no effect on institutional structure. They keep individuals whole while the managerial infrastructure advances untouched. This finding helps explain an apparent paradox that has puzzled scholars of higher education: how substantive epistemic resistance can coexist with a stable and expanding managerial apparatus.

The theoretical stakes of the research extend well beyond Chile. The study engages a rich international literature on the sociology of quantification, which examines how numbers are never neutral descriptions but active devices that reorganize the fields they measure. When community engagement, an inherently relational and context-dependent practice, is translated into standardized indicators, something is necessarily lost: the reciprocity, the long-term trust, the open-endedness that define genuine engagement with communities. The authors argue that commensuration has structural limits in relational fields, and that the Chilean case demonstrates those limits in action. Academics do not passively absorb quantification; they interpret it, contest it, and sometimes subvert it, but their capacity to do so is unevenly distributed.

The Chilean context is essential to the findings. The country’s higher education system has undergone rapid marketization and the consolidation of quality assurance and accreditation mechanisms, making it a revealing site for studying managerialist governance. The social sciences and humanities occupy a particularly exposed position in this system, since their modes of knowledge production and their traditions of public and community engagement fit poorly with indicator-based evaluation. The study situates itself within this national trajectory while drawing comparisons with international research on academic resistance in the managerial university, from analyses of compliance and resistance games to studies of academic capitalism and the gendered structure of precarious research careers. The result is a contribution that speaks simultaneously to Latin American higher education scholarship and to global debates on academic agency.

Methodologically, the research rests on a multiple-case design across four Chilean universities, combining analysis of the formal infrastructures of quantification with 49 semi-structured interviews with social sciences and humanities academics. The interview roster, documented in detail in the published article, captures variation in gender, academic rank, disciplinary area, and institutional affiliation, allowing the authors to trace how each modality of resistance is structured by position. The study was approved by the Scientific Ethics Committee of the University of Tarapacá, and all participants provided informed consent. The research was supported by ANID FONDECYT grants 1241102 and 1221758. The authors, Julio Labraña of the University of Tarapacá and José Joaquín Brunner and Jocelyn López of Universidad Diego Portales, frame their work as part of an ongoing research programme on quantification and university community engagement in Chilean higher education policy.

The implications of the findings are considerable for anyone concerned with the future of universities. For policymakers, the study warns that indicator-based accountability systems do not simply measure engagement; they reshape it, and they do so unevenly, privileging institutions and individuals already endowed with the standing to resist. For university leaders, the research suggests that managerial infrastructures encounter genuine epistemic limits when applied to relational practices, and that ignoring those limits produces not compliance but irony, a corrosive form of consent that signals institutional dysfunction rather than institutional health. For academics themselves, the study offers a vocabulary for naming the differentiated forms of contestation in which they are already engaged, and a reminder that the capacity to speak back to the metric regime is itself a resource, distributed by rank, gender, discipline, and institutional tradition, whose preservation may be one of the most important tasks facing the contemporary academy.

Ultimately, the study reframes the debate about managerialism in higher education. The question is not simply whether academics resist or comply, but which academics can resist, in what ways, and at what cost. By distinguishing dispositional resistance, tactical resistance, and individual coping, the research accounts for the coexistence of substantive epistemic defiance and stable managerial infrastructure, and it exposes the gendered and career-stage inequalities that determine who can contest the quantification of their work and who can only laugh at it. As universities worldwide continue to extend measurement into ever more intimate corners of academic life, the Chilean case stands as a detailed empirical demonstration that numbers change the fields they enter, and that the struggle over what universities owe their communities is, in the end, a struggle over who gets to define the terms.

Subject of Research: Academic resistance to the quantification of community engagement under managerialist governance in Chilean higher education

Article Title: Resisting managerialism through academic voice: contesting the quantification of community engagement in the social sciences and humanities

Article References: Labraña, J., Brunner, J. J., & López, J. (2026). Resisting managerialism through academic voice: contesting the quantification of community engagement in the social sciences and humanities. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01763-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01763-6

Keywords: quantification, community engagement, academic resistance, managerialism, social sciences and humanities, higher education, academic agency, Chile, academic labour, gendered organization, Resisting, academic

Andes virus is a New World orthohantavirus carried primarily by the long-tailed pygmy rice rat, and it is unusual among hantaviruses in its capacity for person-to-person transmission, a feature documented in household clusters in Chile and in so-called super-spreading events in Argentina. Infection produces hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, a biphasic illness that begins with a prodrome of fever, myalgia and gastrointestinal symptoms before progressing abruptly to cardiopulmonary compromise. The hallmark pathophysiology is a dramatic increase in microvascular permeability driven by infection of endothelial cells, leading to non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema, hypoxemia and myocardial depression. Unlike many viral hemorrhagic fevers, the dominant clinical problem is the lung and heart rather than bleeding, and the window from first respiratory symptoms to critical illness can be a matter of hours.

The new study was motivated in part by renewed international attention to the disease after a reported case-outbreak of hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome on a cruise ship, an event that highlighted how rarely appreciated zoonoses can surface in unexpected settings and how gaps remain in global preparedness. The research team, led by Gabriela Meza-Fuentes and René López of Universidad del Desarrollo and Clínica Alemana in Santiago, used Chile’s Diagnosis-Related Groups database to identify patients admitted with the syndrome over a six-year window, a period spanning the pre-pandemic baseline, the COVID-19 pandemic itself and the post-pandemic recovery.

The cohort comprised 215 patients with laboratory-confirmed hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, of whom 69.3 percent were male and 87 percent were adults. Respiratory support was required by 148 patients. Within this group, the escalation of organ support was striking: 14.2 percent received non-invasive ventilation, 36.5 percent were managed with invasive mechanical ventilation, and 49.3 percent ultimately needed extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. In other words, among patients who could not maintain oxygenation on their own, half progressed to the most invasive form of life support available, reflecting the fulminant nature of the cardiopulmonary phase and the limited ability of conventional ventilation to compensate for a lung flooded with protein-rich edema fluid.

Outcomes tracked this intensity of care. The median hospital length of stay was eight days, with an interquartile range of three to fifteen days, and overall in-hospital mortality was 20.5 percent. Case fatality rose steeply with the level of organ support, reaching 29.6 percent among patients on invasive mechanical ventilation and 32.9 percent among those supported with ECMO. These figures are consistent with the historical literature, in which venoarterial or venovenous extracorporeal support has been credited with rescuing a substantial fraction of patients who would otherwise have died of refractory hypoxemia and shock. Early reports from the late 1990s in North America, and subsequent Chilean and Argentine series, established ECMO as the single most effective rescue therapy for the syndrome, and the current cohort confirms that this dependence has not diminished in contemporary practice.

Perhaps the most consequential finding of the temporal analysis concerns the pandemic period. After adjusting for covariates, the COVID-19 pandemic years were independently associated with higher in-hospital mortality from hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, with an adjusted odds ratio of 2.73 and a p-value of 0.045. This echoes observations from other settings in which critically ill patients without COVID-19 fared worse during pandemic surges, a phenomenon attributed to strained intensive care capacity, deferred admissions, exhausted staff and reduced availability of highly specialized resources such as ECMO referral. For a disease in which survival hinges on timely transfer to a center capable of extracorporeal support, pandemic-era system stress could plausibly have delayed the escalation of care precisely when patients were deteriorating fastest.

The pathophysiological substrate of the disease helps explain why it remains so refractory to treatment. Hantaviruses enter host cells through protocadherin-1 and related receptors, infecting pulmonary endothelium and, as recent biomarker work suggests, the alveolar epithelium as well. The resulting vascular leak is amplified by sensitization to vascular endothelial growth factor, while the myocardium fails in a manner resembling a viral cardiomyopathy. Because the injury is primarily immune-mediated and permeability-driven rather than cytopathic destruction, antiviral drugs and corticosteroids have both failed to show clear benefit in randomized trials, including a double-blind Chilean trial of high-dose methylprednisolone and a multicenter trial of human immune plasma. Supportive critical care, fluid-restricted hemodynamic management and extracorporeal rescue therefore remain the pillars of therapy, and mortality has changed little over two decades.

The authors note that their dataset, derived from a national administrative database, captures the real-world distribution of organ support across both public and private hospitals, rather than the referral-biased case series that have dominated the literature. This matters for planning: hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome is seasonal, tied to rodent population dynamics and human exposure in rural central and southern Chile, and clusters of severe cases can rapidly consume regional ECMO capacity. With person-to-person transmission documented and the virus endemic across a broad swathe of Patagonia on both sides of the Andes, the study provides a contemporary benchmark against which emerging interventions can be judged. Several candidate therapeutics, including monoclonal antibodies directed at the viral envelope, are in preclinical development, and any future trial will need outcome data of exactly this kind to size studies and define endpoints.

For clinicians, the message is sobering but practical. Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome in the modern era still kills one in five hospitalized patients, and among those who need respiratory support, the majority will require invasive ventilation and nearly half will need extracorporeal life support. Early recognition of the cardiopulmonary phase, immediate referral to centers with ECMO capability and vigilant preservation of critical care capacity during health system crises are the interventions most likely to move these numbers. The finding that pandemic-era mortality nearly tripled serves as a warning that even a well-organized national response can be vulnerable when intensive care resources are diverted, and it underscores the preparedness gap that recent commentaries on rare zoonoses have emphasized for Andes virus and its relatives.

The study was supported by Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development, and its dataset is publicly available through the Chilean National Health Fund’s open data platform. As climate change, land-use change and human encroachment on rodent habitats continue to reshape the ecology of zoonotic spillover in South America, national cohorts of this kind will remain essential for tracking whether the critical care burden of Andes virus infection is shifting, and whether decades of experience with extracorporeal support are finally being translated into falling mortality.

Subject of Research: Critical care burden, organ support use and outcomes of Andes virus-associated hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome in Chile.

Article Title: Temporal trends in critical care burden and outcomes of Andes virus-associated hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome: a national Chilean cohort

Article References: Meza-Fuentes, G., Delgado, I., Vial, P. A., Godoy-Faúndez, A., Rivera, D., Bernal, Y., Graf, J., & López, R. (2026). Temporal trends in critical care burden and outcomes of Andes virus-associated hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome: a national Chilean cohort. Intensive Care Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00134-026-08599-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00134-026-08599-9

Keywords: Andes virus, hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, critical care, ECMO, mechanical ventilation, in-hospital mortality, Chile, zoonosis, COVID-19 pandemic, intensive care, respiratory support, epidemiology

The scale of the event is difficult to overstate. A caldera is a large volcanic depression that forms during major eruptions, when the rapid evacuation of a magma reservoir causes the ground above it to collapse inward. The Lauca Caldera eruption expelled what the researchers describe as a mountain’s worth of rock, a type of volcanic deposit known as ignimbrite, produced when pyroclastic flows sweep outward at high speed and weld together into solid rock as they cool. The resulting blanket covered an area six times larger than Chile’s capital, Santiago, or nearly three times the size of Greater London, and in places it reached a kilometre in thickness. That immense volume means the deposit’s very shape carries information: whatever terrain lies beneath it must once have fitted snugly under the volcanic sheet, and that geometric constraint is the key to the new study, published in Science Advances.

Because the buried surface cannot be excavated, the team had to infer it indirectly. Their approach was to simulate hundreds of possible ancient landscapes using models of how rivers sculpt mountain ranges over geological time. River incision is one of the dominant forces that carve relief into mountain belts, and the mathematical relationships governing how channel steepness responds to rock uplift, erosion and drainage area are well established in geomorphology. By generating a wide family of plausible pre-eruption topographies, each shaped by realistic fluvial processes, and then testing which of them could plausibly have been covered by the observed volcanic deposit, the researchers turned the ignimbrite sheet into a template. Only certain classes of buried terrain could satisfy the constraint that the overlying deposit, with its measured thickness and extent, could drape across it without impossible gaps or overlaps.

The outcome of that modelling exercise was strikingly decisive. The simulations showed that only relatively low-relief landscapes, comparable in character to gentle mountain foothills, could plausibly have been buried beneath the volcanic blanket. If the pre-eruption terrain had contained deep valleys and sharp ridges, the kilometre-thick deposit would have had to fill enormous voids or drape across slopes in ways that the observed geometry does not allow. The subdued surface implied by the deposit therefore became a geological measurement in its own right, a snapshot of how much vertical relief the Andes in this region had accumulated by the early Miocene, roughly 22 million years ago. From that snapshot, the team could work backwards to the tectonic process that produced it.

Their inference is that this part of the Andes was being built slowly and steadily. The rocks were being pushed upward at no more than a quarter of a kilometre every million years, a rate the authors quantify as 0.26 kilometres per million years. Expressed in human terms, that is equivalent to about 2.5 centimetres, roughly an inch, of uplift every hundred years. The logic is one of exclusion: had the rocks been rising substantially faster, the landscape would have developed steeper slopes and deeper valley relief, and such rugged terrain could not have fitted beneath the immense volcanic deposits. The shape of the ignimbrite blanket thus places a firm ceiling on how quickly the mountains could have been rising in the millions of years before the eruption, a constraint that no single mineral-based dating technique can provide on its own.

The finding carries significant weight in a long-running debate about how the Andes, the longest continental mountain chain on Earth, came to exist. One school of thought holds that the range grew slowly and steadily over tens of millions of years, driven by the sustained compression of the South American plate as oceanic crust slides beneath it. Another proposes that the mountains rose extremely slowly for a long period and then popped up more recently, within the last six to ten million years. The new results, which cover a large portion of the middle of that history, support the slow but steady hypothesis. Lead author Dr Byron Adams, of UCL Earth Sciences, notes that the method offers a way to look back at Earth history over far longer intervals than conventional approaches, which rely on chemical clocks in minerals that are limited to specific moments in time. In this case, he explains, the inferred subdued landscape would itself have taken millions of years to produce.

The sluggish uplift rate implied by the study stands in sharp contrast to many rapidly deforming parts of active mountain belts elsewhere in the world. In portions of the Himalaya, for example, uplift and erosion can proceed at rates of several millimetres to centimetres per year, orders of magnitude faster than the Andean rate inferred here. The comparison underlines how differently mountain belts can behave depending on the details of plate convergence, crustal strength and climate-driven erosion. It also illustrates why a single global model of mountain building is inadequate: the Central Andes, at least in this region and during this interval, were accumulating elevation with almost glacial patience, inch by inch across geological time, rather than lurching upward in dramatic pulses.

The researchers note that their estimate of rock uplift is consistent with earlier independent evidence, particularly studies of minerals in the rock that recorded specific changes in temperature over the last 50 million years. As rocks travel upward through the Earth’s crust, they cool, and certain minerals preserve chemical signatures of the temperatures they have passed through. These thermochronological records act as a partial archive of uplift history, but each mineral system captures only a bounded window of time and temperature. The new volcanic-template approach complements that archive by covering a much longer continuous span, and the agreement between the two independent lines of evidence strengthens confidence in the central conclusion that the Andes in this region have grown gradually rather than abruptly.

Beyond resolving a regional debate, the study offers a genuinely new tool for reconstructing planetary history. Dr Frances Cooper, also of UCL Earth Sciences, who has worked in this part of the Andes for many years, emphasises that the mountains exert a major influence on regional and global climate, so reconstructing their history matters for understanding long-term climate change. The positions and heights of mountain ranges steer atmospheric circulation, control patterns of rainfall and even affect global carbon cycling through the weathering of rock. Because the same analytical approach could be applied to large volcanic deposits elsewhere in the world, wherever voluminous ignimbrites blanket older terrain, the method may allow scientists to resurrect landscapes that have been hidden for millions of years, converting some of the planet’s most violent eruptions into unexpectedly precise instruments for reading its deep past. The research was supported by AXA and the Royal Society, and builds on earlier work in the Central Andes supported by BHP.

The ignimbrite sheet at Lauca belongs to a broader family of explosive eruptions known as caldera-forming events, among the most voluminous volcanic phenomena on Earth. When such eruptions occur, pyroclastic density currents can travel tens of kilometres from the vent in a matter of hours, which is why the resulting deposits can blanket entire drainage networks rather than isolated sites. The preservation potential of these deposits is what makes them scientifically valuable: once welded into rock, an ignimbrite protects the buried surface from the fluvial erosion and tectonic shortening that would otherwise erase it, much as fine ash at Pompeii protected frescoes and streets from the elements.

Northern Chile’s Central Andes are particularly rich in such deposits, because the region hosted a major episode of ignimbrite volcanism during the early Miocene, when large silicic magma systems repeatedly erupted across the Altiplano-Puna plateau region. Each successive sheet offers a potential snapshot of the terrain that existed at the moment of burial, meaning stacked ignimbrites of different ages could in principle be read as a sequence of frames in a long film of landscape evolution. The Lauca deposit, at 21.9 million years old, captures an especially early chapter in the range’s growth.

The study also highlights how geomorphology and volcanology can be combined in unexpected ways. Rather than treating volcanic deposits purely as hazards or as records of eruption dynamics, the researchers exploited them as geometric archives, an approach that requires no direct access to the buried surface and could complement traditional field mapping in remote, high-altitude terrain.

Subject of Research: Using a large ignimbrite deposit from the Lauca Caldera eruption to reconstruct a buried Andean landscape and infer long-term rock uplift rates.

Article Title: Giant volcanic blanket reveals hidden ‘Pompeii’ of Andean landscapes

Article References: Giant volcanic blanket reveals hidden ‘Pompeii’ of Andean landscapes. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Andes, Lauca Caldera, ignimbrite, volcanic eruption, rock uplift, landscape evolution, UCL, Science Advances, geomorphology, mountain building, Chile, pyroclastic flows