An update on the Axion Helioscopes front: current activities at CAST and the IAXO project

Although they have not yet been detected, axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) continue to maintain the interest (even increasingly so) of the rare-event searches community as viable candidates for the Dark Matter of the Universe but also as a solution for several other puzzles of astrophysics. Their property of coupling to photons has inspired different experimental methods for their detection, one of which is the helioscope technique. The CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) is the most sensitive helioscope built up to date and has recently published part of the latest data taken with the magnet bores gradually filled with 3He, probing the mass range up to 1.17 eV. The International AXion Observatory (IAXO) is being proposed as a facility where different axion studies can be performed, with the primary goal to study axions coming from the Sun. Designed to maximize sensitivity, it will improve the levels reached by CAST by almost 5 orders of magnitude in signal detection, that is more than one order of magnitude in terms of gaγ. Here we will summarize the most important aspects of the helioscopes, and focus mainly on IAXO, based on the recent papers [1, 2]

Development of a manual extruder for liposome homogenization

Medications using liposomes are of great interest in pharmaceuticals. They increase the therapeutic index of the drug by enclosing the medicinal substance inside a biocompatible lipid envelope, which releases the solution only in the required area. Such drugs have already shown their effectiveness in the treatment of diseases related to oncology, dermatology, neurology, surgery, etc. To use liposomes for these purposes, it is necessary that their size be in the range from 50 to 200 nm. There are several ways to create vesicles of this size, but mostly they use either ultrasound exposure to a liposome solution or extrusion. The extrusion method is a method that allows to obtain the most homogeneous solution from liposomal particles. For extrusion, a special device – an extruder is required. It is a system that passes a liposomal solution under pressure through a filter with a certain pore size. In this paper, the process of liposome extrusion, types of liposomal extruders are considered and their pros and cons are evaluated, a model of a manual extruder capable of homogenizing up to 20 ml of solution was also developed. Different materials were considered and used for the construction of this device. The inspection of the extruder showed its operability and showed the advantages of using extrusion compared to the ultrasound exposure method