But a new study in the Journal of the International AIDS Society has local and global implications for successfully treating both mental health and HIV/AIDS in settings like South Africa — or even Miami, the epicenter of new cases in the United States.

In the study, an international team of researchers — led by the University of Miami’s Steven Safren and two colleagues — demonstrated the effectiveness of training nurses in public HIV clinics to deliver a specially adapted cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) to help people with depression and uncontrolled HIV adhere to their prescribed medication regiment. CBT is a proven approach for changing faulty or unhelpful thinking or behavioral patterns.

“We know that treating HIV-positive people who are clinically depressed with antidepressants alone does not affect their viral loads. Their depression may improve, but their adherence does not,” said Safren, professor of psychology and director of the University’s Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Mental Health. “So, given the global shortage of mental health professionals, we showed it is possible to train nurses to deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy for adherence and depression (CBT-AD), an intervention that successfully addresses both clinical depression and uncontrolled HIV.”

Safren, who joined the University in 2015 from Harvard Medical School, conducted the study in a poor township just outside of Cape Town, South Africa, with fellow researchers John A. Joska, director of the HIV Mental Health Research Unit and professor of psychiatry at the University of Cape Town, and Conall O’Cleirigh, associate professor of psychology at Harvard and director of Behavioral Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

For their study, the researchers recruited 161 patients with uncontrolled HIV/AIDS and clinical depression from four public health clinics in the township of Khayelitsha. Although a medical officer could prescribe antidepressants to the patients, the clinics have limited psychological services — as does the country in general. According to the study, South Africa only has 0.28 psychiatrists and 0.32 psychologists per 100,000 people.

At the onset of the study, all participants received the usual enhanced care for clinically depressed HIV-AIDS patients who did not achieve viral suppression after receiving the first month of their antiretroviral medication. That customary treatment included another prescription and follow-up meetings with an adherence counselor.

But half the patients were also randomly assigned to attend eight CBT-AD sessions, where specially trained nurses integrated strategies for treating depression with adherence counseling that included modules on life skills, depression, relaxation, mood monitoring, and problem-solving.

The idea, Safren said, was to help patients “turn down the volume” of their mental health symptoms, so they would be more open to counseling on the benefit of taking their medication. To track their adherence, the patients also received an electronic pill box that, every time it was opened, transmitted a real-time signal to a web server.

And, researchers found, the task-shared approach delivered by nurses proved effective. Patients who completed the CBT-AD sessions were more than 2.5 times more likely to achieve undetectable viral loads that those who underwent the usual care.

Now, Safren noted, the next step will be for the research team to evaluate how to sustainably implement the CBT-AD approach in South Africa, or even South Florida. He said the task-shared approach could be viable in Miami, where there are fewer services to help people achieve viral suppression than in other U.S. cities with large populations of people living with the virus.

“South Africa has the most cases of HIV/AIDS in the world and Miami is the city with the highest incidence of new cases in the U.S. — so there is a parallel,” Safren pointed out. “And unlike places like New York or Massachusetts, where people are more likely to be virally suppressed, Florida doesn’t have the same public health resources. If, for example, you’re an HIV patient at Massachusetts General or Fenway Health, where I used to work, and you miss your visit, or your viral load becomes uncontrolled, social workers will swoop in and provide assistance. That doesn’t happen as often in Florida and other places in the U.S. with less public health HIV/AIDS funding.”

In addition to Safren, Joska, and O’Cleirigh, other co-authors on the study included Jasper S. Lee, a Ph.D. student, and Sierra A. Bainter, an assistant professor, both in the Department of Psychology at the University; as well as researchers from the University of Maryland, College Park; the University of Science and Technology in Mbarara, Uganda; the University of Washington in Seattle; and Stellenbosch University in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

The gold standard for imaging and diagnosing diseases within the retina, OCT has yet to find widespread use as an imaging technique for other parts of the body due to its inability to return clear images from more than a millimeter beneath the skin’s surface.

Duke researchers found that tilting the light source and detector used in the technique increases OCT’s imaging depth by almost 50%, putting skin diagnoses within reach. The “dual-axis” approach opens new possibilities for OCT to be used in applications such as spotting skin cancer, assessing burn damage and healing progress, and guiding surgical procedures.

The results appear online on December 1 in the open access journal Biomedical Optics Express.

“It’s actually a fairly simple technique that sounds like something out of Ghostbusters — you get more power when you cross the beams,” said Adam Wax, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. “Being able to use OCT even 2 or 3 millimeters into the skin is extremely useful because there are a lot of biological processes happening at that depth that can be indicative of diseases like skin cancer.”

Standard OCT is analogous to ultrasound but uses light instead of sound. A beam of light is shined down into an object, and by measuring how long it takes for it to bounce back, computers can deduce what the internal structure of the object looks like. It has become the go-to technology for imaging and diagnosing retinal diseases because the retina is so thin and easily accessible through the eye’s transparent cornea and lens.

Most other biological tissues, however, scatter and reflect light, making it difficult to penetrate with standard OCT approaches. The deeper the light goes, the more likely it is to get lost in the sample and miss the device’s detection.

In the new technique, researchers instead point the light at the object at a slight angle and set up the detector at an equal and opposite angle, creating a dual-axis. This allows the detector to benefit from the slight scattering angle introduced by the object’s physical nature.

“By tilting the light source and detector, you increase your chances of collecting more of the light that’s scattering off at odd angles from a tissue’s depths,” said Evan Jelly, a doctoral student in Wax’s laboratory and first author of the paper. “And OCT is so sensitive that just a little bit more of that scattered light is all you need.”

According to Jelly, researchers have tried this dual-axis approach in other imaging modalities. But through his experiments, Jelly discovered how to apply this to OCT. His key discovery was that the depth of the focal point of light within the tissue makes a large difference in how well the dual-axis approach works.

However, there is a catch: The greater the angle used to identify deeper signal, the smaller the field of view becomes. To get around this issue, Jelly devised a method of scanning the focus of the narrower window through various depths of the tissue and then using a computational algorithm to combine the data into a single image.

In the paper, Wax and Jelly tested this approach with fabricated tissues and hairless mice to benchmark its performance against standard OCT to see what information it could reveal in a live animal’s skin. The controlled experiments showed that the dual-axis OCT approach does tend to outperform the standard setup. And in the live mice, the dual-axis OCT was able to image the tip of a needle 2 millimeters beneath the skin’s surface, where 1.2 millimeters is traditionally the landmark depth.

“The dual-axis OCT gave us images and information from the layers of skin where blood and molecular exchanges are occurring, which is extremely valuable for detecting signs of diseases,” said Jelly. “The technology is still in its infancy, but it is primed to be highly successful for biosensing or guiding surgical procedures.”

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (CBET-2009841, IIP-1827560).

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Jacquet, an assistant professor of geological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science, believes this study offers a new way for scientists to investigate how different biological armored systems worked throughout the fossil record.

“By using micro-CT, we can virtually separate the individual components of the armor,” Jacquet said. “That allows us to see how it protected these worms until, unfortunately, they went extinct during one of the major extinction events in the fossil record. We are able to manipulate the virtual models to determine how the individual armor pieces moved relative to each other, as well as determine the degree of overlap between them.”

At the time of their existence, these worms were likely living near coral reefs in shallow water on what is now land in Australia. The study identified these worms to have two overlapping armor systems — one going down the length of the organism’s skeleton, and the other down both sides of the worm. While no direct correlations have been made yet between these worms and any modern species, Jacquet believes her study can deepen our understanding of convergent evolution.

“Convergent evolution is where different and unrelated groups adapt similar features,” Jacquet said. “While this armor is a rather unique adaptation, and one that clearly does well for particular environments and protecting against particular predators, we do see other similar adaptations in a couple of unrelated animal groups, such as pangolins, pill bugs and millipedes.”

Jacquet said Lepidocoleus caliburnus is named after the famous sword “Excalibur” from the Arthurian legend, and Lepidocoleus shurikenus is named for its resemblance to the outline of shuriken, the Japanese word for throwing stars. She said future plans for this work include using virtual models to study how these armor systems fared against different types of stressors, such as under a predator attack.

“Sclerite assembly, articulation and protective system of Lower Devonian machaeridians,” was published in Papers in Paleontology. Other authors include Tara Selly and Jim Schiffbauer at MU, and Glenn Brock, who has dual appointments at Macquarie University in Australia and Northwest University in China.

Funding was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation (EAR CAREER-1652351 and EAR/IF-1636643) and internal research development grants from Macquarie University. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

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“People recovering from heart damage often face a long and tricky journey. Healing is challenging because of the constant movement tissues must withstand as the heart beats. The same is true for vocal cords. Until now there was no injectable material strong enough for the job,” says Guangyu Bao, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.

The team, led by Professor Luc Mongeau and Assistant Professor Jianyu Li, developed a new injectable hydrogel for wound repair. The hydrogel is a type of biomaterial that provides room for cells to live and grow. Once injected into the body, the biomaterial forms a stable, porous structure allowing live cells to grow or pass through to repair the injured organs.

“The results are promising, and we hope that one day the new hydrogel will be used as an implant to restore the voice of people with damaged vocal cords, for example laryngeal cancer survivors,” says Guangyu Bao.

Putting it to the test

The scientists tested the durability of their hydrogel in a machine they developed to simulate the extreme biomechanics of human vocal cords. Vibrating at 120 times a second for over 6 million cycles, the new biomaterial remained intact while other standard hydrogels fractured into pieces, unable to deal with the stress of the load.

“We were incredibly excited to see it worked perfectly in our test. Before our work, no injectable hydrogels possessed both high porosity and toughness at the same time. To solve this issue, we introduced a pore-forming polymer to our formula,” says Guangyu Bao.

The innovation also opens new avenues for other applications like drug delivery, tissue engineering, and the creation of model tissues for drug screening, the scientists say. The team is even looking to use the hydrogel technology to create lungs to test COVID-19 drugs.

“Our work highlights the synergy of materials science, mechanical engineering and bioengineering in creating novel biomaterials with unprecedented performance. We are looking forward to translating them into the clinic,” said Professor Jianyu Li, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Biomaterials and Musculoskeletal Health.

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Arabia Terra is in the northern latitudes of Mars. Named in 1879 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, this ancient land covers an area slightly larger than the European continent. Arabia Terra contains craters, volcanic calderas, canyons and beautiful bands of rock reminiscent of sedimentary rock layers in the Painted Desert or the Badlands.

These layers of rock and how they formed was the research focus for Koeppel along with his advisor, associate professor Christopher Edwards of NAU’s Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science along with Andrew Annex, Kevin Lewis and undergraduate student Gabriel Carrillo of Johns Hopkins University. Their study, titled “A fragile record of fleeting water on Mars,” was funded by the NASA Mars Data Analysis Program and recently published in the journal Geology.

“We were specifically interested in using rocks on the surface of Mars to get a better understanding of past environments three to four billion years ago and whether there could have been climatic conditions that were suitable for life on the surface,” Koeppel said. “We were interested in whether there was stable water, how long there could have been stable water, what the atmosphere might have been like and what the temperature on the surface might have been like.”

In order to get a better understanding of what happened to create the rock layers, the scientists focused on thermal inertia, which defines the ability of a material to change temperature. Sand, with small and loose particles, gains and loses heat quickly, while a solid boulder will remain warm long after dark. By looking at surface temperatures, they were able to determine the physical properties of rocks in their study area. They could tell if a material was loose and eroding away when it otherwise looked like it was solid.

“No one had done an in-depth thermal inertia investigation of these really interesting deposits that cover a large portion of the surface of Mars,” Edwards said.

To complete the study, Koeppel used remote sensing instruments on orbiting satellites. “Just like geologists on Earth, we look at rocks to try to tell stories about past environments,” Koeppel said. “On Mars, we’re a little bit more limited. We can’t just go to a rock outcrop and collect samples — we’re pretty reliant on satellite data. So, there are a handful of satellites orbiting Mars, and each satellite hosts a collection of instruments. Each instrument plays its own role in helping us describe the rocks that are on the surface.”

Through a series of investigations using this remotely gathered data, they looked at thermal inertia, plus evidence of erosion, the condition of the craters and what minerals were present.

“We figured out these deposits are much less cohesive than everyone previously thought they were, indicating that this setting could only have had water for only a brief period of time,” said Koeppel. “For some people, that kind of sucks the air out of the story because we often think that having more water for more time means there’s a greater chance of life having been there at one point. But for us, it’s actually really interesting because it brings up a whole set of new questions. What are the conditions that could have allowed there to be water there for a brief amount of time? Could there have been glaciers that melted quickly with outbursts of huge floods? Could there have been a groundwater system that percolated up out of the ground for only a brief period of time only to sink back down?”

Koeppel started his college career in engineering and physics but switched to studying the geological sciences while earning his master’s degree at The City College of New York. He came to NAU to work with Edwards and immerse himself in the thriving planetary science community of Flagstaff.

“I got into planetary science because of my excitement for exploring worlds beyond Earth. The universe is astoundingly big, even Mars is just the tip of the iceberg,” Koeppel said. “But we’ve been studying Mars for a few decades now, and at this point, we have a huge accumulation of data. We’re beginning to study it at levels that are comparable to ways we’ve been able to study Earth, and it’s a really exciting time for Mars science.”

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Voggel and her team were able to determine the masses of the two objects by looking at how the gravitational pull of the black holes influences the motion of the stars around them. The bigger black hole, located right at the core of NGC 7727, was found to have a mass almost 154 million times that of the Sun, while its companion is 6.3 million solar masses.

It is the first time the masses have been measured in this way for a supermassive black hole pair. This feat was made possible thanks to the close proximity of the system to Earth and the detailed observations the team obtained at the Paranal Observatory in Chile using the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on ESO’s VLT, an instrument Voggel learnt to work with during her time as a student at ESO. Measuring the masses with MUSE, and using additional data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, allowed the team to confirm that the objects in NGC 7727 were indeed supermassive black holes.

Astronomers suspected that the galaxy hosted the two black holes, but they had not been able to confirm their presence until now since we do not see large amounts of high-energy radiation coming from their immediate surroundings, which would otherwise give them away. “Our finding implies that there might be many more of these relics of galaxy mergers out there and they may contain many hidden massive black holes that still wait to be found,” says Voggel. “It could increase the total number of supermassive black holes known in the local Universe by 30 percent.”

The search for similarly hidden supermassive black hole pairs is expected to make a great leap forward with ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), set to start operating later this decade in Chile’s Atacama Desert. “This detection of a supermassive black hole pair is just the beginning,” says co-author Steffen Mieske, an astronomer at ESO in Chile and Head of ESO Paranal Science Operations. “With the HARMONI instrument on the ELT we will be able to make detections like this considerably further than currently possible. ESO’s ELT will be integral to understanding these objects.”

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