In a rather wonderful and incredibly science-fiction-like display, a few researchers have discovered how to make spaghetti which is just 372 nanometers thick. Though not as slurpable as the real stuff, this discovery could have great effects in the medical and science fields.
A paper was recently published entitled "Nanopasta: Electrospinning nanofibers of white flour" which details the process of creating 370 nm pasta, which is just under 1/5000th the size of traditional spaghetti (via University of London).
Alright, what the team is making isn't quite the same as the pasta you order at a restaurant. It doesn't use egg and flour together to make strands that you then cover in sauce. It starts similarly but ends rather differently. Using a method called 'electrospinning', a machine grabs threads of flour and mixes them with a liquid before using an electric charge to pulse them forward through a needle, creating that spaghetti shape.
Effectively, this means that a physical object doesn't need to be used to push the flour, negating much of the space that would be taken up by it. As described in the paper, "by dissolving 17 wt% flour in warm formic acid and cooling, a dope can be created which can be electrospun into porous mats of 372 nm fibers of pasta."
Importantly, this is much thinner and more efficient than previous ways of getting this spaghetti fibre, and it can be used in "next generation bandaging, or carbonized supercapacitor electrodes". It replaces previous methods of getting starch in "biosourced nanofiber applications", which are a sequence of words that goes over my head somewhat.
Rather cheekily, in the conclusion of the paper, the researchers do the ultimate 'um actually' by stating "as the newly developed material consists of fibers formed from the extrusion and drying of flour, it may be defined as pasta, dramatically undercutting the previous record for the thinnest pasta lunga by approximately a thousand times."
Though you won't be using this to mop up that carbonara sauce anytime soon, it's a pretty funny way of accidentally getting a world record. I'll take the world's thinnest conchiglie next.
