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Objectives: In this study, the effectiveness of a couples-based group intervention to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV), Strength at Home Couples (SAH-C), was examined on a military installation relative to a comparison intervention, Supportive Prevention (SP). It was expected that greater reductions in use of physical, psychological, and sexual IPV behaviors, as well as reduced suicidality, would be found among service members and their partners in SAH-C relative to SP. Method: Participants included 138 couples randomized to SAH-C and SP through a clinical controlled trial embedded in a hybrid effectiveness implementation study which took place on a military installation. The Revised Conflict Tactics Scales and Multidimensional Measure of Emotional Abuse were used to measure IPV, and 13 Military Suicide Research Consortium common data elements were used to assess suicidality. Results: Service members randomized to SAH-C evidenced greater reductions based on effect sizes across the assessment time points for all IPV variables, including use of overall physical IPV, severe physical IPV, sexual IPV, psychological IPV, and coercive control IPV relative to those randomized to SP. Partners of service members demonstrated a similar general pattern for reductions in use of IPV, but findings were not as robust as for service members. Both service members and partners demonstrated greater reductions in suicidality based on effect sizes when randomized to SAH-C relative to SP. Conclusions: Findings extend prior work demonstrating the promising effects of SAH-C delivered in the military context and highlight the possible benefits of SAH-C in preventing self-harm thoughts and behaviors. What is the public health significance of this article?: This study describes how the SAH-C intervention may serve to prevent aggression toward one's partner and oneself in military couples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coordinated motion of cilia is a fascinating and vital aspect of very diverse forms of eukaryotic life, enabling swimming and propulsion of fluid across cellular epithelia. There are many questions still unresolved, and broadly they fall into two classes. (i) The mechanism of how cilia physically transmit forces onto each other. It is not known for many systems if the forces are mainly of hydrodynamical origin, or if elastic forces within the cytoskeleton are important. (ii) In those systems where we know that forces are purely hydrodynamical, we do not have a framework for linking our understanding of how each cilium behaves in isolation to the collective properties of two or more cilia. In this work, we take biological data of cilia dynamics from a variety of organisms as an input for an analytical and numerical study. We calculate the relative importance of external flows versus internal cilia flows on cilia coupling. This study contributes to both the open questions outlined above: firstly, we show that it is, in general, incorrect to infer cilium-cilium coupling strength on the basis of experiments with external flows, and secondly, we show a framework to recapitulate the dynamics of single cilia (the waveform) showing classes that correspond to biological systems with the same physiological activity (swimming by propulsion, versus forming collective waves). This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Unity and diversity of cilia in locomotion and transport'.

The chimera state is the incongruous situation where coherent and incoherent populations coexist in sets of identical oscillators. Using driven non-linear oscillators interacting purely through hydrodynamic forces at low Reynolds number, previously studied as a simple model of motile cilia supporting waves, we find concurrent incoherent and synchronised subsets in small arrays. The chimeras seen in simulation display a "breathing" aspect, reminiscent of uniformly interacting phase oscillators. In contrast to other systems where chimera has been observed, this system has a well-defined interaction metric, and we know that the emergent dynamics inherit the symmetry of the underlying Oseen tensor eigenmodes. The chimera state can thus be connected to a superposition of eigenstates, whilst considering the mean interaction strength within and across subsystems allows us to make a connection to more generic (and abstract) chimeras in populations of Kuramoto phase oscillators. From this work, we expect the chimera state to emerge in experimental observations of oscillators coupled through hydrodynamic forces.