This spaghetti is so thin it can't be photographed with a regular camera

No, you can't eat the world's thinnest spaghetti. It's 200 times thinner than a human hair, which means you'd have a hard time spotting it on a plate and an even harder time cooking it.

So why make it? Researchers at University College London (UCL) developed nanoscale threads from a mixture of flour and liquid in an effort to create porous fibers to help heal wounds and regrow tissue. It's an accessible and environmentally friendly approach to developing scaffold material that, given its composition, is technically pasta.

The team used a method called electrospinning, in which synthetic or natural polymers can be used to manufacture fibrous components for medical devices and therapeutic agents for addressing tissue loss.

Electrospinning involves feeding a solution through a needle, and applying an extremely high voltage to said needle. This causes a thin jet of the solution to be ejected out of the needle, and it then deposits on a collector. The jet undergoes stretching and whipping motions while it moves through the air, and so we get solid dried nanofibers deposited on the collector in a mat-like formation.

While edible pasta is made using flour and water, the researchers used flour and formic acid because the latter breaks up the large stacks of spirals that make up starch. Without formic acid, the layers of spirals would be too big to form the building blocks of these nanofibers. The formic acid also evaporates as the jet of fluid flies through the air to the metal collector plate in the electrospinning process.

Image source: Beatrice Britton / Adam Clancy.