Researchers from the University College London have done what celebrity chefs and Italian grandmothers could only dream of: They have made the world’s thinnest spaghetti. This culinary accomplishment has yielded strands of starch nanofibers that are just 372 nanometers wide, which is invisible to the naked eye and 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 would be able to keep out bacteria while allowing moisture through. Rather than going through the labor-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 would make conventional spaghetti to accompany your Bolognese, only on a much, much smaller scale. There's still a lot of research to be done before the product will be appearing in the doctor's office, but this is a step toward more sustainable starch nanofibers. Sadly, it’s not useful as pasta, especially since it would overcook in less than a second.
