The thinnest pasta in the world will not satisfy gourmets, but it may heal wounds

Scientists have been able to produce the thinnest strands of spaghetti in the world, which are 200 times thinner than a human hair. These techniques may be a challenge for even the fastest chefs, overcooking in a split second, but they could have applications in medicine and industry.

Adam Clancy At University College London, he and his colleagues created a mixture of flour and formic acid, a common food preservative. They used electrical forces to push this mixture through a hollow needle, which extruded nanofibers just 372 nanometers in diameter, too small to be seen with the naked eye.

Such thin fibers have been produced from starch extracted from plants before, but Clancy says the process is harmful to the environment. “It’s just: soak the corrosives, dissolve them in water, rinse them, then throw them in the river,” he says.

But with flour mixtures, that doesn’t happen. All you have to do is grind the grains to form flour and mix it with formic acid, he says.

The resulting “nanoblast” can then be spun into a small mat about 2 cm wide. Although it’s not intended to be food, Clancy says it should be safe to eat, but he’s reticent to talk about his experience. He says: “It is an ethical dilemma to talk about self-scientific experiments.” “But, in theory, one might expect it to be chewier than you expect.”

Clancy believes a range of other natural raw materials could be even more beneficial, with dried potatoes – which have a higher starch content and lower fiber content than flour mixtures – making better nanofibres.

Such materials can be woven Bandages “It allows air and moisture to pass through freely, but keeps bacteria out,” Clancy says. Nanofibers are also being used as a scaffold for tissue regrowth, and are being tested for use in filtration systems and… Batteries.

Topics: