As global temperatures rise, so does the frequency and intensity of severe weather events and their risks to people and assets. These risks are especially acute for Pacific Islanders in urban informal settlements, given their socio-economic vulnerabilities and limited political influence. There is growing awareness that national adaptation strategies may not fully meet the needs of these vulnerable communities, leading to a focus on community-led adaptation. However, these approaches are in their infancy and have been criticised for fostering paternalistic tendencies, prompting calls for external institutions to facilitate rather than direct community initiatives. This research utilises Photovoice, a method recognised for its cultural relevance and ability to amplify Indigenous and marginalised voices. It involves 42 households in Fiji's Greater Suva Urban Area, using resident-led photography and interviews to explore community-based flood adaptation. Through ethnographic content analysis and inductive coding, the study captures residents’ experiences and strategies, identifying over 31 unique adaptation measures and underscoring the importance of resources, social networks, traditional knowledge, beliefs, and leadership in enhancing adaptive capacity. The findings demonstrate the complexity of factors influencing adaptation, with resource availability and social capital being crucial. The study advocates for adaptive processes that are community driven, calling for a shift in research and funding to support these programmes in a flexible, responsive, and inclusive manner. It also highlights the need to understand community dynamics to prevent paternalistic practices and integrate local insights effectively, ensuring community self-determination in adaptation efforts.

Group configurations shape social skills and learning outcomes by fostering student interaction and collaboration. Yet, the factors influencing group formation, social cohesion, and group stability have remained understudied in physics education. Here, we examine these factors in a cohort of 90 students from ninth and tenth grades at a private school in Chile. For a semester-long physics project, students were assigned to groups either through random allocation (control group) or given the autonomy to form their own groups (experimental group). Our findings indicate that the groups formed by choice developed stronger friendship bonds throughout the semester, while the groups formed randomly demonstrated greater levels of cooperation and more frequent changes in membership, suggesting weaker social cohesion. Additionally, tenth-grade students were more likely to stay in their original groups, possibly indicating increased social maturity. These findings emphasize the ongoing challenge in education of balancing student choice in group formation with the need for diverse group compositions that enhance learning. This study provides practical recommendations for physics teachers and researchers.

Investigating the formation of social connections in educational settings reveals significant insights into student development. This research focuses on a school intervention aimed at enhancing collaboration and friendship among high school students during a school year. A semester-long intervention included two classrooms where students were grouped based on existing affinities, and two classrooms with teams randomly assigned by the teacher. Friendship, collaboration, and peer nomination networks for academic reputation were measured throughout the academic year. We employed the Multiple Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure (MRQAP) to analyze changes within the social networks in each classroom independently. Findings demonstrate the gravity of friendship ties for collaboration, with affinity-based teams engaging mostly in an 'inward' collaborative approach relying on inside-group friends. Conversely, working relations in the experimental classroom showcase an 'outward' strategy by leveraging friends across different groups. The collaborative activities addressed during the semester led to the formation of new friendships and significantly influenced the evolution of social networks across consecutive semesters. This analysis underscores the classroom as a dynamic social ecosystem and highlights how deliberate strategies for group formation can foster meaningful social and developmental advancements to improve individuals' social inclusion and its potential for learning and development.

Climate change has increased the frequency and severity of weather events worldwide, significantly affecting marginalized communities in Pacific Island Countries, especially in urban informal settlements. These communities face substantial challenges that necessitates a focus on resilience strategies. The prevalence of macro-resilience frameworks and top-down approaches, which often fail to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, has sparked calls for targeted resilience efforts. Limited empirical evidence on how urban informal settlements respond, adapt, or recover from slow-onset human-induced climate events such as coastal, pluvial, and fluvial flooding, further impedes the operationalization of resilience. The study utilizes the Disaster Resilience Integration Framework for Transformation (DRIFT) to explore how macro-resilience frameworks represent the unique challenges faced by marginalized communities across 10 flood-prone urban informal settlements. Focusing on 42 households within Fiji's Greater Suva Urban Area, it documents the resilience capacities that influence flood protection and identifies broader factors that enable or constrain transformative resilience. The findings emphasize the importance of recognizing all resilience capacities as interconnected components within a holistic system, where communities adapt and rely on a blend of responses to navigate systemic constraints. Communities often move both "upward" and "downward" along the resilience spectrum as they confront evolving challenges. Recognizing this interconnectedness is crucial for effectively operationalizing resilience in marginalized communities in the Global South.Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry identifier: ACTRN12618000633280..

Global challenges, such as climate change, persistent poverty, and food insecurity are complex problems. These societal, environmental, and economic challenges cross scientific disciplines, communities, and geographies, requiring interdisciplinary, North–South solutions. Nevertheless, prevailing sustainability science responses are Western-centric. Some seminal studies have attempted to understand and engage with diverse knowledge systems. These include decolonial and Indigenous methodologies, such as “Two-Eyed Seeing”, which emphasizes the importance of using both Western and Indigenous knowledge to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the world, and participatory action research, which highlights the importance of involving participants in the research process and promoting social change through collaborative effort. However, apart from in-country research collaborations with traditional Indigenous knowledge, most North–South studies overlook the role or influence of Western-centric views and therefore fail to recognize and incorporate diverse worldviews and knowledge systems. This may, in part, reflect the tendency to categorize research into disciplinary silos, but more likely is the unintentional, yet prevalent, view that Western science is “objective and neutral.” As more scholars from multiple disciplines and geographies focus on interdisciplinary North–South research, it is critical that researchers reflect on dominant research approaches and knowledge production. Studies can co-construct, reproduce, or control the forms of knowledge generated—whether intentional or unintentional. This paper presents an organizing framework to help researchers navigate, understand, and engage with diverse forms of knowledge in undertaking North–South research. The framework draws on empirical observations from the authors’ interdisciplinary research and from empirical cross-cultural literature. It comprises three contextual levels of influence, featuring guiding principles and subsequent practical actions researchers can use to navigate the complexities of knowledge co-construction in North–South research.

Social learning, the ability to perceive, interpret, and assess the behavior of one’s peers, is crucial for forming meaningful relationships and succeeding in various learning environments. Yet, the rise of online and hybrid settings poses new challenges to socialization. Here, we study the social interactions among 191 high school physics students in Chile, comparing online and hybrid classrooms that were assigned in the COVID-19 pandemic context. We found that students in hybrid settings were more connected and more likely to form casual relationships outside their immediate friend groups, which allowed them to gather new information from diverse sources. Along the same lines, in online classrooms, students who excelled in physics occupied more central positions in social networks. This trend was not evident in hybrid settings, suggesting that when social cues are limited, academic performance gains greater importance in establishing social hierarchies and potentially limiting access to diverse information. Our study highlights the importance of social interactions in educational contexts and raises questions about the impact of relational inaccessibility on virtual learning.

Group configurations play a pivotal role in shaping social skills and learning outcomes by fostering student interaction and collaboration. Yet, the factors influencing group formation, social cohesion, and group stability remain understudied. Here, we examine these factors in a cohort of 90 students from 9th and 10th grades at a private school in Chile. Students were either randomly assigned to groups (control) or allowed to choose their own groups (experimental) for a semester-long project. Our results show that self-selected groups had stronger friendship ties by the end of the semester. In contrast, randomly assigned groups exhibited higher levels of cooperation and more frequent membership changes, indicating weaker social cohesion. Additionally, 10th-grade students were more likely to stay in their original groups, possibly suggesting increased social maturity. These findings underscore the ongoing challenge in education of balancing student choice in group formation with the need for diverse group compositions that enhance learning. The study provides actionable insights for educators.

Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions take place under conditions that favor commitment, trust, and decision making among those who interact. The worldwide pandemic due to COVID-19 and the transition to emergency remote teaching have added new challenges for collaboration, mainly because now students??? interactions are wholly mediated by information and communication technologies. This study first explores the effectiveness of different collaborative relationships over performance in physics from a sample of secondary students from two schools located in rural and urban areas in southern Chile (exploratory study). We used social network analysis to map academic hierarchies as in the nominations for proficient peers in physics (i.e., physics prestige), collaboration, and friendship ties. We define a strong association if two students who collaborate shared a friendship tie. Using ordinary least squares multiple linear regression models on physics grades, we found positive effects of collaboration over grades, particularly among students working with friends (strong ties). To test whether the effects of collaboration found in the first study were stable throughout two semesters, the following year we designed a quasiexperiment in four classes from the same urban school in the exploratory study. Here, students attended hybrid school sessions where research participants were either in the classroom or participated remotely. The teacher collected the same social networks described in the first study at the end of semester 1, and two times during semester 2. In addition, we followed the same procedures to identify strong and weak collaboration from the network data on each wave of data collection. After fitting ordinary least squares multiple linear regression models, we found that collaborative variables negatively associated with grades on activity 1 (semester 1), yet at the end of the year (activity 3 in semester 2) having strong working ties became positively associated with physics grades. Interestingly, the relationship of academic hierarchies measured in physics prestige with grades transitions from positive on semester 1 to null by the end of the year. These results contribute to the literature of collaboration in physics education and its effectiveness, by taking into account social relationships and the needed time for developing beneficial collective processes among students in the classroom. We discuss these results and their implications for instructional design and guidelines for constructive group-level processes.

People perceive, interpret, and assess others’ behaviors to build social ties even at young ages, affected by local contexts, which can lead, in the end, to improving learning experiences, resolving complex tasks, or creating companies. After the recent healthcare crisis due to COVID-19, online and hybrid social interactions are more prevalent in current social relationships and particularly relevant in education because information communication technologies now modulate behaviors. Here, we explore the role of social behaviors and their local contexts in building social networks and driving individual network centrality. Chilean education configuration provides a natural setting for exploring social relationships because students remain in the same group eight hours per day during their entire primary (eight years) and secondary (four years) school years. Thus, in the social mix of the classroom, students would show and witness their and others’ behaviors in both academic and social activities. We conduct two studies in different educational levels: i) primary school students (858 students from 45 different classrooms) and ii) secondary (191 students from eight different classrooms) to test cognitive and social drivers for network centrality. In the first study, we map the network collaboration for 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade students. We find that 3rd-grade students exhibit more connections in their social networks than older students. Besides, we observe that social perception of popularity, prosociality, aggressiveness, and social preferences drive network centrality. In the second study, we separated secondary students into two different local contexts: hybrid and online teaching modalities. We find that students exhibit more network connectivity in the hybrid setting, and good student perception does not drive individual network centrality. On the other hand, in classrooms performing online teaching, the perception of good students is positively associated with network centrality. These results support the idea that students behave by following and interpreting social behaviors in their interactions, even in young populations. The availability and use of information for tie formation are dependable on students’ cognitive maturity and accessibility to face-to-face interactions, where popularity and pro-social behavior, for instance, become more evident.

Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions take place under conditions that favor commitment, trust, and decision-making among those who interact. The sanitary situation and the transition to remote teaching has added new challenges for collaboration given that students' interactions are mediated by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In this study we explore the effectiveness of different collaborative relationships on physics and mathematics, from a sample of secondary students from two schools located in rural and urban areas in southern Chile. We used Social Network Analysis (SNA) to map students' friendships relations, academic prestige, and collaboration on both courses. Later we combined the collaboration network with friendship and academic prestige on the course, to separate strong from weak friendship working ties, and those among students who enjoy or not academic prestige. Multiple linear regression models showed, on average, positive effects of collaboration on grades. Yet, when isolating the effects of the types of collaboration, the positive effects are observed only between those who display more strong friendship ties. Also, we found differences on the social networks and their effects over grades between both courses, presumably due to their pedagogical nature. With these results we contribute to the literature of collaboration and its effectiveness based on the nature of students' relationships, and advocate for the importance of instructional design in fostering appropriate motivations and guidelines for constructive collaboration in the classroom.

The human red blood cell (RBC) membrane has significant elastic capabilities which can be described measuring typical membrane edge fluctuations and mechanical properties by optical techniques. The RBC elastic properties can be affected by changes in the surrounding media. In an attempt to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of the interaction of resveratrol with the red cell membrane and of its antioxidant capacity the changes in mechanical properties of the RBC membrane were analyzed. These studies were carried out through measurements of RBC membrane fluctuations in the presence of the oxidant agent HClO using thermal fluctuation spectroscopy (TFS). The observed results showed that the elastic capabilities of RBC changed with low concentration of hypochlorous acid but without morphological changes. However, in the presence of resveratrol the deformation and decrease of elastic capabilities induced by HClO on RBC decreased. These in vitro results demonstrated the protective effect of RV against the detrimental effects triggered by HClO upon human erythrocytes.

The management of fish stocks in Chile caught by small-scale fishing boats are subject to catch quotas. Due to the massive number of fish landings, solely a very small number of landings can be inspected. In this paper, we present the first step in order to develop a vision system for automatically checking the fish quotas. This first step consists in automatically classifying the different fish species that must be checked, based upon the hypothesis that different small pelagic fish species should have different spectral signatures. Thus, we collected hyperspectral cubes, in the Near Infrared (NIR) band, for the following three species of interest: Chilean Silverside (Odontesthes regia), Southern Rays Bream (Brama australis), and Silver Hake (Merlucciidae). The hypercubes, containing 256 spectral bands in the range of 900-1700 nm, were processed and labeled to obtain the spectral signatures of the species. The spectral signatures were used to develop k-nearest neighbor and support vector machine classifiers. Their performance was compared using n-fold cross-validation and 5000 trials. When only a small subset of spectral bands was used by the classifiers, the average classification rate achieved was approximately 80%. When the entire spatial-spectral information was used, the average classification rate raised to 90%.