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The paradox startled scientists at the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) more than a dozen years ago. The more heat they beamed into a spherical tokamak, a magnetic facility designed to reproduce the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars, the less the central temperature increased.

Big mystery

“Normally, the more beam power you put in, the higher the temperature gets,” said Stephen Jardin, head of the theory and computational science group that performed the calculations, and lead author of a proposed explanation published in Physical Review Letters. “So this was a big mystery: Why does this happen?”

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Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have been able to produce antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in hen eggs. Antibodies harvested from eggs might be used to treat COVID-19 or as a preventative measure for people exposed to the disease. The work was published July 9 in the journal Viruses.

“The beauty of the system is that you can produce a lot of antibodies in birds,” said Rodrigo Gallardo, professor in poultry medicine, Department of Population Health and Reproduction at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. “In addition to a low cost to produce these antibodies in hens, they can be updated very fast by using updated antigens to hyperimmunize hens, allowing protection against current variant strains.”

Birds produce a type of antibody called IgY, comparable to IgG in humans and other mammals. IgY does not cause allergy or set off immune reactions when injected into humans. IgY appears both in birds’ serum and in their eggs. As a hen lays about 300 eggs a year, you can get a lot of IgY, Gallardo said.

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Motors are everywhere in our day-to-day lives—from cars to washing machines. A futuristic scientific field is working on tiny motors that could power a network of nanomachines and replace some of the power sources we use in devices today.

In new research published recently in ACS Nano, researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin created the first ever optical . All previous versions of these light-driven motors reside in a solution of some sort, which held back their potential for most real-world applications.

“Life started in the water and eventually moved on land,” said Yuebing Zheng, an associate professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering. “We’ve made these micro nanomotors that have always lived in solution work on land, in a solid state.”

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