Not really a food thing at all. But… What would you think if you saw a random online headline that announced: ‘a pasta so tiny you can’t see it with the naked eye’? Nanopasta is not for eating, but has many potential uses elsewhere in our lives…
Nanopasta: Right, as individual fibres under an electron
microscope. Left, as a surgical dressing ‘matrix’.
I knew it was way too early in the year for an April Fool’s joke. But was regaled, nonetheless, by mem-ories of what may be the best media April 1 joke ever hatched: BBC’s 1951 documentary feature on the annual Spaghetti harvest in Switzerland.
Nevertheless…
Nanopasta is real, and it has real, practical applications in our daily lives. At just 370 nanometers wide (about two hundredths the width of a human hair) it’s so thin that an individual strand is in-visible to the naked eye. In fact, you’d need an electron microscope to discern see it.
But it’s made with a mixture of formic acid and flour, almost like regular pasta is, with water and flour. And rather than kneading, rolling and then cutting into ribbons by hand, the researchers ex-plained, they used an electrospinning technique to thread the flour through the top of a needle with an electric charge.
Medical uses obvious
“It’s literally spaghetti but much smaller,” experiment spokesman Adam Clancy told with SciNews. “So, why use flour? As Clancy added, “Starch is a promising material to use as it is abundant and renewable. It is the second largest source of biomass on Earth, behind cellulose. And it is biode-gradable, meaning it can be broken down in the body.”
It’s also surprisingly strong, and, in many forms, flexible. As such it could find uses in micro-mem-branes to nano-filter gasses and liquids.
So it could be used to protect wounds, as natural skin regenerates underneath them. And never have to be removed, like surgical sutures (‘stitches’) and conventional dressings often have to be.
Team member Beatrice Britton also suggested that nanopasta could also find applications, “as scaffolding for bone regeneration, and [substrates] for drug delivery.”
Researchers also noted their discovery has already, “attracted interest across many applications, from biofuels to cosmetics to papermaking.” Not to mention electronics and
Making history…
But Clancy may occupy a unique place in the history of nanopasta, as the first intrepid soul to actually cook and taste it.
“I know you’re not meant to self-experiment, but I’d made the world’s smallest pasta,” Clancy told Scientific American. But, “I couldn’t resist.”
His verdict? The stuff is so vanishingly small that even a relatively huge length of it doesn’t represent much of a mass. Not so much there to taste, so… Not that much taste there!
~ Maggie J.