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.

In a new paper in Nanoscale Advances, the team describe making spaghetti just 372 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across using a technique called electrospinning, in which threads of flour and liquid are pulled through the tip of a needle by an electric charge.

“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.”