Fresh Science

Australia wastes 7.3 million tonnes of food a year, with Australian households responsible for dumping more than half of that: about 4.1 million tonnes or around 9kg of food from every home, every week. But for the first time, we know exactly what we waste, how it is wasted, and where it goes. Researchers from…

Babies conceived through in vitro fertilisation may have an increased risk of heart disease in adult life, an Adelaide scientist has found. Monalisa Padhee, of The University of South Australia, found sheep fetuses conceived through IVF had bigger hearts than those born naturally, raising questions about the long-term health effects of the popular technology. “An…

Cooking minerals in huge mixing tanks can turn them to jelly, and an Adelaide researcher has found out why. The work could save the industry millions of dollars a year in lost production and cleaning costs. Sticky gel-like materials form during the liquid processing of mineral ores, when clays present in the deposits release elements…

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.