World’s thinnest spaghetti won’t please gourmands but may heal wounds

Scientists have created the world’s thinnest spaghetti, which is 200 times thinner than a human hair. Even the fastest cooks would be challenged to overcook their food in less than a second, but they could have applications in medicine and industry.

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

The slender fibers were previously produced from starch extracted from plants, but Clancy said the process was harmful to the environment. “It’s just: soak it in a corrosive material, dissolve it in water, rinse it and throw it in the river,” he said.

But with flour blends, that doesn’t happen—you just grind the grains to make flour and then mix it with formic acid, he says.

The resulting “nanopasta” can then be spun into small mats about 2 centimeters in diameter. Clancy said that while it’s not intended as food, it should be safe to eat, but he wouldn’t talk about whether he’s tried it. “Talking about scientific self-experimentation is an ethical dilemma,” he said. “But, hypothetically, people might think it’s chewier than you think.”

Clancy believes a range of other natural raw materials may be more useful, such as dehydrated potatoes – which are higher in starch and lower in fiber than flour blends – with the potential to create better nanofibers.

This material can be woven into bandage Clancy says it allows air and moisture to pass through freely but blocks bacteria from entering. Nanofibers are also used as scaffolds for tissue regeneration and are being investigated for use in filtration systems and Battery.