Researchers have created the world's smallest pasta, using starch and formic acid, exploring its potential as a wound dressing.
The skinniest pasta yet made—let’s call it “nanotini”—has an average diameter of 372 nanometers and only two ingredients: flour plus formic acid. The latter, a caustic agent typically sprayed by agitated ants, is why researcher Adam Clancy sniffed his creation before he ate it. It is generally inadvisable to consume things pickled with formic acid.
But Clancy, a chemist at University College London, relied on his understanding of the acid’s odor threshold—the lowest concentration at which the human nose can detect a substance. Clancy trusted that if the pasta was scentless, then it contained too little acid to be dangerous. Satisfied, he chewed a wad of nanotini. “I know you’re not meant to self-experiment, but I’d made the world’s smallest pasta,” Clancy says. “I couldn’t resist.” Clancy and his colleagues aren’t trying to whip up something for Italian restaurants; they are investigating starch nanofibers for their potential as next-generation bandages. Mats of these fibers have pores that permit water to pass through but are too small for bacteria, Clancy says. Ideal wound dressings aren’t simple barriers. They should also speed recovery, points out Cornell University graduate student Mohsen Alishahi, whomade with starch derivatives and wasn’t involved with the nanotini project. “Using a natural material such as starch to develop the wound dressing can help the wound heal more quickly,” Alishahi says. Starch should encourage cells around an injury to grow because the fibers resemble the body’s microscopic structural network, called the extracellular matrix. And starch has another natural advantage: made by every species of green plant, it is one of the most common organic compounds on the plane
SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY HEALTH FOOD NANOTECHNOLOGY
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