It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, December 05, 2025
Birds move higher up mountains as the climate warms
Bird species are shifting to higher elevations over time, likely in response to climate change. The red line represents the mean elevation of birds, which has moved uphill after 20 years.
Many bird species have moved toward colder areas in the mountains of Europe as the climate has warmed over the past two decades. Sunny southern slopes attract birds to live at higher elevations than do shadier northern slopes.
A new study examined 177 bird species in four large mountain ranges: the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Scandinavian Mountains, and the British Highlands. Of these species, 63 per cent moved uphill. This uphill movement has averaged about half a metre per year in the 2000s.
The fastest change happened in Scandinavia and the Alps — for example, the northern wheatear has shifted an average of 33 metres uphill in the Scandinavian mountains since 2001. No significant uphill shift was observed in Great Britain or the Pyrenees. This indicates that the causes behind range shifts, such as the intensity of climate change and human land use, vary from region to region.
In mountainous areas, local climatic conditions, or microclimates, can vary considerably even over short distances. For example, the northern mountain sides receive less sunlight than the southern sides, resulting in cooler and wetter conditions. These differences affect the habitats of species.
"Sunny slopes attract birds to higher elevations because vegetation zones and food resources are located higher up. However, birds are also moving uphill at the same rate on shady slopes, which suggests that warming temperatures are affecting the entire mountain landscape", explains PhD researcher Joséphine Couet from the Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki.
The results show that broader climatic trends are driving birds to move uphill in the mountains across Europe. Slopes that are less exposed to solar radiation could serve as refuges, but these small-scale advantages are not enough to counteract large-scale uphill movements.
"Mountain areas are not only majestic landscapes, but also hotspots of biodiversity, home to many species that depend on specific climatic and habitat conditions. This information is crucial for conservation planning in complex terrains where local conditions vary greatly", Couet emphasizes.
The study was published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography and is based on bird monitoring data from eight European countries between 2001 and 2021.
Credit: University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science
A new article published in Nature Communications offers insight into how government planners can better account for the many uncertainties that accompany the transition from fossil-fuel power systems to renewable or decarbonized systems. The paper, titled “Identifying key uncertainties in energy transitions with a Puerto Rico case study,” is the work of a team from the University of Virginia including first author Kamiar Khayambashi, a Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Khayambashi and his advisor, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Negin Alemazkoor, worked with co-authors Andres Clarens, a CEE professor and associate director of the UVA Environmental Institute, and UVA emeritus professor of public policy William Shobe. In the paper, they make a compelling case that planners need to do better at taking the right uncertainties into account when readying for an energy transition.
The team developed a three-stage analytical framework and applied it to the electricity system of Puerto Rico, a hurricane-prone island heavily dependent on fossil fuels. The study analyzed three transition pathways: Business as Usual (BAU), Fully Renewable (FR) by 2050 and Fully Decarbonized (FD) by 2050.
Key results show that changes in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes due to climate change emerged as the single largest source of uncertainty in the expected total system cost. Organizational inefficiency (e.g., delays, miscoordination in restoration of infrastructure services) was the second most important uncertainty but is rarely included in energy-system modeling.
“In a high-hurricane-risk region with a history of institutional inefficiencies such as Puerto Rico — and the case of grid restoration after Hurricane Maria — the yearly cost of the power grid cannot be accurately judged without explicitly modeling the uncertainties in climate, technology, fuel and institutional performance,” Khayambashi said.
Unfortunately, when it comes to planning and investments, the appropriate uncertainties are not considered, which leads to inaccuracies. As utilities and regulators plan long-term investments in clean energy transitions, many models assume a fixed “best-guess” value for fuel prices, technology cost declines, and weather or climate trends. This new research shows that such deterministic planning may miss critical cost-risks from multiple interacting uncertainties, especially in regions vulnerable to extreme weather and with consistent institutional efficiency challenges.
This study offers a strategic way to focus on data collection, modeling refinement and risk-mitigation efforts: identify which uncertainties matter most.
“Demonstrating that the high-dimensional uncertainty in long-term planning can be reduced to a few key factors may encourage planners to explicitly account for those critical uncertainties, rather than ignoring them because the problem seems overwhelmingly complex,” Alemazkoor said.
For example, in Puerto Rico, energy planners should integrate climate extreme risk models — here, that would be hurricane frequency and intensity — into infrastructure cost and resilience assessments. And organizational risk, such as restoration delays after storms, should be treated as a quantifiable input cost, not just a sidenote.
While the case study is specific to Puerto Rico, the authors emphasize that the framework can be applied in other geographies and under differing policy horizons.
“Our results show that resilience and organizational performance can matter as much as fuel price volatility when designing energy systems for the long term,” Clarens said.
This research paves the way for more robust, uncertainty-aware energy transition planning, especially for regions facing extreme weather and institutional constraints.
America doesn’t have enough hospital beds. This could help.
Michigan Medicine's data-driven command center had the effect of adding beds by reducing emergency department boarding and length of stay while boosting patient transfers
Views of areas of the command center at Michigan Medicine, the academic medical center of the University of Michigan. The center, known as M2C2, is the hub for determining the flow of patients into and out of the three Ann Arbor hospitals of U-M Health.
Every day, across the nation, patients wait hours or days in emergency departments until a bed opens up for them in the hospital.
Patients in smaller hospitals wait to get transferred to larger ones that can handle their complex health needs.
And patients ready to leave the hospital often wait hours before they’re released, tying up beds that others need.
The problem will only get worse, experts project, due to a collision of the aging population, changes in health policy and insurance coverage that impact hospital finances, and shortages of clinical staff.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst, it details the impact of the command center M2C2, short for Michigan Medicine Command Center, that U-M opened three years ago, to coordinate inpatient bed use across the three Ann Arbor hospitals of University of Michigan Health.
In its first two years, the authors report, the command center and other operational changes increased bed use efficiency so much that it was as if U-M Health had opened 63 more adult inpatient beds.
The authors hope their detailed report will help other hospitals start or fine-tune their own command centers and the procedures that guide their clinical operations.
“We have tackled a lot of factors that affect the length of a hospital stay, and created procedures that let us use every last bed all the time, and optimize the capacity in the system,” said Vikas Parekh, M.D., associate chief medical officer for U-M Health and the study’s senior author.
“There’s still work to be done, but our efforts have translated into shorter waits for patients and increased the number of patients who can get the care they need from our highly skilled clinical teams.”
Key achievements in hospital bed use efficiency
The M2C2 project was co-led by the paper’s lead author Jennifer Pardo, MHSA, a senior information technology project manager, and Maxim V. Garifullin, M.S., a lead solution architect in the Capacity Management team.
The new paper assessed performance before, and two years after, the M2C2 opened.
In that time, the team found:
The total time adult patients spent waiting for available beds at University Hospital and the Frankel Cardiovascular Center dropped by 33%. This included a 37% drop in the time it took to get a bed assigned to adults who arrived at U-M via the emergency department and were approved for an inpatient stay.
Children waiting for beds at the U-M C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital had a 13% reduction in the bed-assigning time.
U-M Health went from accepting 70% of requests to transfer patients from other hospitals to accepting 80% of them, thanks to new processes for prioritizing transfers in a data-driven way so that more patients can receive high-level quaternary care.
Patients who were ready to leave the hospital procedures experienced a 12% drop in the time from discharge order to departure for adults, and 9% for children, thanks to streamlined processes after physicians sign discharge orders.
Length of stay for adults dropped 8%, even after adjustment for patient complexity.
And while the command center cost $2.1 million to build in converted space on the medical campus, and the staff needed to run it cost $1.5 million per year, the effort has still yielded an estimated $19.5 million net positive impact on U-M Health’s bottom line. Some of the funds to create M2C2 came from donors.
Technology plus operational improvements
Pardo notes that the M2C2 command center relies heavily on two technological tools: the data dashboards made possible by the Epic electronic health record system that U-M Health and many other hospitals use, and an artificial intelligence patient placement tool developed in-house by a team led by her colleague and co-author.
“These data and analytical tools are critical, but so are the structure, governance, workstreams, procedures and goals that allow our staff to make the most of them,” she said.
She notes that because U-M Health built its own data infrastructure, rather than purchasing services from one of the companies offering such tools, it was able to share the information publicly through the paper.
M2C2's full name is the Michigan Medicine Capacity Operations and Real-time Engagement, or C.O.R.E., Center. It combines the operations of several units that previously coordinated bed use and transfers.
The walls of its three rooms are covered with 32 huge screens displaying key information that staff can monitor and use in decisions about moving patients into beds or accepting them from another hospital.
Key data are available via intranet to staff anywhere, with color-coding for levels of real-time bed availability.
How it started, where it’s going
Part of the impetus for creating M2C2 was the COVID-19 pandemic, and the abrupt and prolonged change in bed use that happened in its first months.
But even before then, U-M Health had faced high demand for inpatient care, with hospital occupancy rates far above national averages.
It was also instrumental during the opening of several observation units, most recently this April, for patients whose care requires a very short stay, often after an emergency department visit.
Two levels of the building known as University Hospital South, which once housed the children’s hospital, have been converted for such care to accommodate demand.
Now, the team is working with hospital leaders in U-M Health’s regional network by implementing aspects of the system at UM Health-Sparrow in Lansing and UM Health-West in the Grand Rapids area.
The command center will also be instrumental to the upcoming project to renovate and change bed use in University Hospital, which opened 40 years ago when two-bed rooms were the norm.
A pattern for others to follow
The space has become a magnet for visitors from other health systems seeking to emulate U-M Health’s success, and for students from the U-M Medical School, College of Engineering, School of Information and School of Public Health.
Hospitals seeking to build their own command centers should start by focusing on exactly what they are trying to achieve, and then using tools such as Epic’s dashboards to get there, said Garifullin.
"The key is building solutions for each challenge, such as managing transfers, or the goal of ‘no beds fly empty’, using technology, people and processes,” he said.
Parekh, who is a hospitalist physician and professor of internal medicine, agrees.
“You can’t put a command center on top of a non-optimized system. You have to optimize the system first,” he said.
Having buy-in from top leadership to align all relevant resources around the command center structure and governance – from information technology to nurse staffing – is also critical.
Erica Herbst, R.N., who manages the team of patient flow coordinators in M2C2, notes that the opening of the command center has allowed her team to take a proactive approach to placing patients in beds.
“What once required hours of manual work has become much easier based on a proactive approach, and the staff feel better supported to make difficult decisions,” she said.
In the end, said Parekh, “Our focus is on how to get rid of avoidable delays in the system that affect the patient’s journey, by leveraging every resource we have. A more efficient hospital stay also means meeting evidence-based milestones along the way – even something as simple as timely urinary catheter removal or getting a patient up walking soon after surgery. That will create better clinical outcomes, reduce length of stay and lead to fewer readmissions."
Additional authors: Many additional individuals contributed to the study and to M2C2’s outcomes. Some notable mentions include Niki Farquhar, M.S.E., a co-author on the Catalyst paper, as well as members of the M2C2 management and administrative team including Herbst, Christina Tikkanen M.S.W., Jess Bethel, Denyce Henderson R.N., Paul Paliani M.B.A., and Dolorence Okullo M.H.I.
Paper cited: “Designing a Hospital Command Center with Proven ROI: The University of Michigan M2C2 Model,” NEJM Catalyst. DOI: 10.1056/CAT.25.0080
When a parent loses their partner, the family dynamic changes significantly. But who steps up – and who steps back? Researchers have investigated this in a comprehensive study of 676 Korean families with a total of 2,351 adult children.
‘We see that support is not just about gender, but about a complex combination of birth order, sibling distribution and timing,’ says Mengni Chen, assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, who is behind the study.
Support peaks – and then declines
The study reveals clear patterns: Eldest sons increase their financial support the most in the early stages of widowhood – but withdraw again after a few years. Eldest daughters take primary responsibility for caring for the dying parent in the terminal phase. Younger sons are least likely to help – both with care to the dying parent and with moving in with the surviving parent.
‘Eldest sons typically step in with money, while eldest daughters take care of the care – but both roles are temporary,’ explains Mengni Chen.
The study shows that support from children increases sharply immediately after death but declines significantly in later stages. According to Mengni Chen, this points to a need for action:
‘Encouraging more balanced sharing of caregiving responsibilities among all family members during the transition to widowhood, regardless of gender and birth order, along with expanding access to professional end-of-life care could help reduce the growing eldercare burden,’ she emphasises.
Cultural shift on the way?
Mengni Chen points out that the results challenge traditional patriarchal norms in Korea:
‘It is remarkable that daughters – especially the eldest – play such a central role in critical phases. This may contribute to a broader cultural shift from son preference to daughter preference,’ she concludes.
The study, entitled ‘Sibling Dynamics in Adult Children's Support Across Parental Widowhood Phases in Korea’, was co-authored by Mengni Chen and Dahye Kim, Hong Kong Baptist University
It is published in the Journal of Marriage and Family – read the study here.
