Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
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Title: Chemists have created the world's thinnest spaghetti

Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2024 20:15:09 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/science/chemists-hav...

Researchers from the University College London have done what celebrity chefs
and Italian nonnas could only dream of: they've made the world's thinnest
spaghetti. This culinary-sounding accomplishment, published in Nanoscale
Advances, has yielded strands of starch nanofibers that are just 372
nanometers wide, which is invisible to the naked eye and is even smaller than
some wavelengths of light.

"The world's thinnest spaghetti" sounds silly, but starch can actually have
important applications in medicine. For instance, nanofiber starches could
help wounds heal when used in bandages, since they'd be able to keep out
bacteria while allowing moisture through. Rather than going through the
energy-intensive process of refining their own plant cell starch for
nanofibering, these chemists decided store-bought was fine and made their
strands directly from flour. Their version of the nanofibers were created
with a process called electrospinning, where an electric charge pulls a flour
and liquid mixture through extremely small metal holes into threads that are
just nanometers wide. Extrusion through a die is literally the same way you'd
make conventional spaghetti to accompany your bolognese or your meatballs,
only at a much, much smaller scale.

There's still a lot of study to be done before the product will be appearing
in the doctor's office, but this is a step toward more sustainable starch
nanofibers. And while I would pay good money to watch chefs try to explain
invisible pasta on a reality show, electrospinning almost certainly won't
become the new molecular gastronomy hotness. As co-author Professor Gareth
Williams of the UCL School of Pharmacy put it: "I don't think it's useful as
pasta, sadly, as it would overcook in less than a second, before you could
take it out of the pan."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/science/chemists-hav...
spaghetti-201509365.html?src=rss

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