The world’s thinnest spaghetti won’t please gourmets, but it may heal wounds

Scientists have produced the world’s thinnest spaghetti strands, 200 times thinner than human hair. These can overcook even the fastest chefs in a fraction of a second, but they have potential applications in medicine and industry.

Adam Clancy and his colleagues at University College London created a mixture of flour and formic acid, a common food preservative. They used electrical force to force this mixture into a hollow needle, releasing nanofibers just 372 nanometers in diameter. This is too small to be seen with the naked eye.

Such fine fibers have previously been made from starch extracted from plants, but Clancy says the process is harmful to the environment. “You just soak it in a corrosive substance, dissolve it in water, wash it off, and throw it in the river,” he says.

But with flour mixtures nothing like that happens. Simply grind the grain to make flour and mix it with formic acid, he says.

The resulting “nanopasta” is rotated to form small mats approximately 2 centimeters in diameter. Clancy says it’s safe to eat, although it’s not intended for use as food, but he won’t say if he’s tried it. “It’s ethically questionable to talk about scientific self-experimentation,” he says. “However, some people might expect it to be more chewy than expected.”

Clancy says that using dried potatoes, which have higher starch and lower fiber content than flour mixtures, could make a variety of other natural raw materials even more useful, and potentially produce even better nanofibers. That’s what I think.

Such materials can be woven into bandages to allow air and moisture to pass through freely, but keep bacteria out, Clancy says. Nanofibers are also used as scaffolds for tissue regrowth and are being investigated for use in filtration systems and batteries.