[HN Gopher] Chemists Create World's Thinnest Spaghetti
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Chemists Create World's Thinnest Spaghetti
Author : pseudolus
Score : 105 points
Date : 2024-11-22 11:37 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| ggm wrote:
| > _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.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| Did the Italians greenlight this?
| brookst wrote:
| No, it was a pomodoro sauce
| ggm wrote:
| "did you use Tipo 00 flour" -no I used tipo
| 00000000000000000000000000000000 flour.
| taitems wrote:
| 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.
| aloha2436 wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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.
| graypegg wrote:
| 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.
| StringyBob wrote:
| This spaghetti also reminding me of a scene from the three body
| problem (trying to avoid spoilers)
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Mentioned in the article, the second thinnest spaghetti
| https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20161014-the-secret-behin...
| WillyWonkaJr wrote:
| "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.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| 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...
| consf wrote:
| Imagine what marvels we might rediscover
| fluoridation wrote:
| >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.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| 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.
| rvba wrote:
| So those joke videos to use ramen noodles as fiber and superglue
| were kind of real?
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| A strong contender for the Ig Nobel prize.
| consf wrote:
| What really stands out to me is the potential for real-world
| applications, particularly in medicine
| inanutshellus wrote:
| since publicly calling out "this smells like a robot" just
| makes the robots sneakier... what's the alternative? :ponder:
| fedeb95 wrote:
| they just had to look at my code.
| latexr wrote:
| > 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.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| My only complaint with it is that they use the acronym UCL
| without defining it.
| ranit wrote:
| Immediately under the title you will find:
|
| > by University College London
|
| Therefore repetition may not be necessary.
| Stedag wrote:
| I read the parent as sarcasm and chuckled.
| hammock wrote:
| 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/
| fluoridation wrote:
| >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).
| istultus wrote:
| I would use "elucidate" first and foremost, but
| "decipher" or "unravel" also work.
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| bb123 wrote:
| I think this is a branding thing. They refer to themselves
| pretty much everywhere as "UCL".
| wenc wrote:
| 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.
| seanw265 wrote:
| 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.
| anamexis wrote:
| It's the same for KFC (the fried chicken chain). It
| officially no longer stands for anything, they're just
| called KFC.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Reebok => RBK
|
| The trend to be meaningless is a confusing decision to
| me. Guess it's a good thing that's not my department
| tokinonagare wrote:
| Yes, Universite 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.
| wenc wrote:
| Oh I know you're trying to be sarcastic but Universite
| Catholique de Louvain has been branded UCLouvain since
| 2018 and its old acronym never had international
| traction.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| 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.
| sumosudo wrote:
| What's the cooking time?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Al dente is three seconds.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > 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."
| lupusreal wrote:
| Maybe you could just wave it through the steam.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrospinning
| qrush wrote:
| So what, no fuckin' chemical ziti now?
| the-chitmonger wrote:
| 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...
| TZubiri wrote:
| Finally string theorists found real world business applications
| mandmandam wrote:
| > 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.
| robblbobbl wrote:
| Spaghetti _thumbs up_
| overcast wrote:
| As if angel hair pasta wasn't already an abomination! :D
| eddieh wrote:
| 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.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| 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.
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| Gethsemane wrote:
| 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...
| ericra wrote:
| 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
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