Fresh Science

Longer shelf lives for creams and lotions, and better control over how and where the active ingredients they contain are released. Those are the potential benefits of using specially engineered nanoparticles—so small that about a thousand of them could fit across a human hair—to create the emulsions on which such cosmetic and therapeutic products are based, says Nasrin Eskander from the University of South Australia’s Ian Wark Research Institute.

Salads, shampoos and mining to benefit from theoretical research into droplets How much effort does it take to understand the behaviour of oil droplets? A multi-disciplinary team of six researchers from the University of Melbourne has spent the best part of two years, and used $300,000 of equipment to crack the problem.