Chemists Create World's Thinnest Spaghetti | Hacker News Reader

Chemists Create World's Thinnest Spaghetti

phys.org

129 pointspseudolus59 comments

> The world's thinnest spaghetti, about 200 times thinner than a human hair, has been created by a UCL-led research team. The spaghetti is not intended to be a new food but was created because of the wide-ranging uses that extremely thin strands of material, called nanofibers, have in medicine and industry.

This is a fantastic first paragraph, which unfortunately is not the norm. It succinctly explains what was created (world's thinnest spaghetti), the scale at which it is impressive (200 times thinner than a human hair), who did it (a UCL-led research team), and why it matters (the second sentence) while simultaneously explaining what it is not for that most people would think about.

It’s impossible to provide every minute detail in one short paragraph, but that one is dense with information, clear, and gives you an immediate sense if the article is of interest to you.

Kudos to the University College London. Though I’d like to be more specific and know exactly who wrote/edited that.

My only complaint with it is that they use the acronym UCL without defining it.

Immediately under the title you will find:

> by University College London

Therefore repetition may not be necessary.

I read the parent as sarcasm and chuckled.

Your complaint is valid, despite the fact this article is a press release/byline being republished from University College London. UCL doesn't even enumerate (expand? is there an alphabetic variant of "enumerate"?) the acronym on its home page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/

>expand? is there an alphabetic variant of "enumerate"?

In this context it would be either "expand" or "explicitate" (because the operators thought the meaning was so obvious that leaving it implicit was enough).

I would use "elucidate" first and foremost, but "decipher" or "unravel" also work.

Technically the full name is on the homepage if you look at the footer, which has the full address. Looking around the website, they seem to take the branding seriously as being UCL, which is less generic than the full name which looks more like a description than a name. I’ve seen other colleges do the same.

We can argue if that’s a good or bad decision, but it seems to be intentional.

I think this is a branding thing. They refer to themselves pretty much everywhere as "UCL".

UCL is a widely known acronym, like MIT.

It’s not as famous as MIT but still known to anyone in academia and most in the anglosphere.

Related: there is a small college in NYC named "LIM", which used to stand for "Laboratory Institute of Merchandising." A few years back they updated their branding and now the name quite literally stands for nothing.

They are just "LIM" now. A former acronym, reduced to a mononym.

It's the same for KFC (the fried chicken chain). It officially no longer stands for anything, they're just called KFC.

Reebok => RBK

The trend to be meaningless is a confusing decision to me. Guess it's a good thing that's not my department

Then I think they went back? At least in Australia, in 2019.

Says "Kentucky Fried Chicken" on the web site though.

https://www.kfc.com/

Yes, Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) is a well known acronym. It's not a reason not define it in an article, in case other universities share the same acronym.

Oh I know you’re trying to be sarcastic but Université Catholique de Louvain has been branded UCLouvain since 2018 and its old acronym never had international traction.

I understand why you complain, but UCL is obviously an acronym of a university, and most people won't care much which specific university did this. The ones that do can readily find it. I'm much more annoyed when three-letter jargon with more than one meaning is used without context.

> The researchers also had to carefully warm up the mixture for several hours before slowly cooling it back down to make sure it was the right consistency.

Always got to let the nano-gluten relax.

I hope they used phosphor bronze extruding electrostatic fields. The sauce needs the rough edges to coat.

Did the Italians greenlight this?

No, it was a pomodoro sauce

"did you use Tipo 00 flour" -no I used tipo 00000000000000000000000000000000 flour.

Thanks for afternoon laugh!

Mentioned in the article, the second thinnest spaghetti https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20161014-the-secret-behin...

"In the last few years, Italy’s premier food and wine magazine, Gambero Rosso, has invited her to Rome twice so they can film her preparing the dish."

I breathed a sigh of relief when I read this.

It does make me wonder what marvelous skills have been lost to time because of secrecy or difficulty in recording the process.

Well, the rest of the article basically describes how anyone else but her seemed to uninterested in investing the time and energy to learn and make this pasta or, when interested, found themselves unable to. Including chefs, scientists, and "Barilla Engineers" (prbly one of the coolest or at least most wholesome engineering positions IMHO)

So a video in itself might not be enough...

>It does make me wonder what marvelous skills have been lost to time because of secrecy or difficulty in recording the process.

It's okay. Sturgeon's law applies uniformly, so almost all of it is of no note whatsoever.

That's why secret societies were born to protect the valuable 10% of skills that did work exceptionally well, and were hard to rediscover by on your own.

Eh, even my grandmother used to do absolutely delicious pumpkin empanadas that none of my aunts managed to replicate. Might be local flour, the way of cooking the pumpkin, unusual spices, specific dough fermentation, her stove, who knows?

She decided not to share the whole recipe, even if she likely learned it from her mother, probably because it was a source of income.

I wish I had your optimism about that still. Sturgeon's law is probably true, but I no longer believe that the best is recognized or preserved.

The way I see things now is some sort of corollary: Sturgeon was an optimist, and the percent of inferior things is so high it is difficult to find the things that are not. By extension, the best is likely to be lost.

Maybe that's a characteristic of our times though, and less true of the past.

I first learned of this pasta from this video: https://youtu.be/O5JyezoCTJs Apparently they are up from 3 to 7 people who can make it now.

> Professor Williams added, "I don't think it's useful as pasta, sadly, as it would overcook in less than a second, before you could take it out of the pan."

Jeeze, talk about trying nothing and all out of ideas.

You can make 372 nanometer pasta, but can't conceive of cooking times under a second? I want nano pasta god dammit.

Blast that nano spaghetti with atomized tomato steam and flash freeze it; zap it with a laser and run it through Bose-Einsten condensate; sous vide it in some lil carbon nanotubes; whatever you gotta do.

If CNT (Carbon Nanotubes) are displaying similar risk factors to asbestos, what is the scale difference between these? I've never felt so compelled to eat something that could kill me.

I believe the issue with CNTs and asbestos is that once they're in your lungs, your body won't be able to break it down. This is literally made of flour.

This.

Asbestos is like having glass shards that are so sharp they keep damaging cells and never go away. Constant cellular repair statistically results in cancer.

I assume it's orders of magnitude better than asbestos obviously, since flour is organic and decomposes, but it still doesn't seem great. If the particulate is this small, it can probably get pretty deep into your lungs and just sit there for a while. I'm no expert, but I don't know what would decompose flour in your lungs, especially if it's going to get deeper being so light and tiny.

Like it's not asbestos, but it's also not air. So maybe nanopasta comes with an MSDS binder.

Bakers have been around for a long time w/ plenty of exposure to airborne flour. I wonder if they tend to have lung issues like similar trades do.

This spaghetti also reminding me of a scene from the three body problem (trying to avoid spoilers)

I am a fan of the colour scheme they selected in figure 2 - very relevant. https://pubs.rsc.org/image/article/2024/na/d4na00601a/d4na00...

As if angel hair pasta wasn't already an abomination! :D

Exactly this! And you have to expect that as the diameter approaches zero your pasta becomes indistinguishable from a gelatinous lump of gluten aka paste.

I'm not the biggest fan of angel hair either, but one thing that it does have going for it is that it cooks about as fast as fresh pasta, like 2-3 mins. It's no bucatini but in a pinch or with small hungry humans to feed it's nice to have around.

I have to be very care buying spaghetti, because I have to carefully avoid tubular, thin, instant, spaghettoni, etc. As well as fettuccine and others because they're in similar packaging. My family is distraught if they get served anything other than the standard no.4 spaghetti!

I'm nowhere near an expert on this subject, but I've heard that E. coli can be a serious issue with uncooked flour. Not sure if anyone else was concerned about these flour nano-noodles touching wounds (as they're not cooked, per se), but from what I can tell, these noodles are only 372 nm wide[0] while E. coli is something on the order of 2,000 nm (2 micrometers) in length[1]. It could also be that the electrospinning process separates these threads from any contaminants(?) I'd love to hear someone with more familiarity on the subject give their take.

[0]: TFA - https://phys.org/news/2024-11-chemists-world-thinnest-spaghe... [1]: https://www.britannica.com/science/bacteria/Diversity-of-str...

Finally string theorists found real world business applications

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrospinning

A strong contender for the Ig Nobel prize.

Gotta be honest, given much of the news I have been consuming in the past few weeks, I could read 100 articles like this. Concise, well-written, interesting and about potentially useful research...

And the prospect of helping wounds heal with nano spaghetti is just cool

they just had to look at my code.

No respect unless they find a way to make a small hole down the middle. Bucatini, our love affair was short but intense. Please come back.

What really stands out to me is the potential for real-world applications, particularly in medicine

since publicly calling out "this smells like a robot" just makes the robots sneakier... what's the alternative? :ponder:

Idk man but that one smells alright.

I know we're not supposed to mention it, but it's getting distinctly whiffy on this forum in general lately. Dunno if this arms race can be won by the wet brains.

So those joke videos to use ramen noodles as fiber and superglue were kind of real?

Spaghetti thumbs up

What's the cooking time?

Al dente is three seconds.

> Professor Williams added, "I don't think it's useful as pasta, sadly, as it would overcook in less than a second, before you could take it out of the pan."

Maybe you could just wave it through the steam.

So what, no fuckin' chemical ziti now?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com