Scientists from University College London have created the thinnest spaghetti in the world. It’s not exactly edible, or even visible, but it sure is small. It measures just 372 nanometers in diameter—around 200 times thinner than a strand of human hair.
While the world’s thinnest spaghetti can be eaten it’s not intended to be eaten. It’s part of a study all about creating ultrathin fibers for medical use, like tissue regeneration.
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The spaghetti filaments so thin they can only be viewed with an electron microscope were created using a method called electrospinning. The process involves applying high voltage to a liquid solution being moved through a needle. This causes the needle to eject an extremely thin filament made out of the liquid solution. As this filament gets deposited on a collector, it gets stretched and whipped through the air, drying out the nanofibers. The result is a bunch of spaghetti so small, so thin, that you wouldn’t be able to see it if it were slopped on your plate.
The extremely tiny pasta was made using flour, as normal. Instead of water, however, the researchers used formic acid, which means it was still technically edible since formic acid is commonly used as a food additive, but it’s also commonly found in bee stings and ant bites, so it can be mildly irritating to the skin.
They used formic acid because the starch in the flour is made up of large stacks of spirals. The formic acid breaks up these spirals while also helping to evaporate fluids more quickly to aid in the drying process. Essentially, formic acid is like a hair de-curler.
The result is pasta so tiny it can only be described as “nanopasta” — a pasta so thin it would immediately overcook if it was boiled. The nano pasta is so thin that it is 1,000 times thinner than the previous record holder for the thinnest pasta on earth.
Su filindeu is a rare pasta handmade in Sardinia by one family. The name Su filindeu translates to “the threads of God.” Nanopasta is fun to say and all but you just can’t beat the drama of “the threads of God.”
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