The world's thinnest pasta has been created by a team of chemists, but the sauce is still a mystery.

Researchers have created a spaghetti that is only 372 nanometers in thickness. It's a wonderful and science-fiction display. This discovery, though not as tasty as the real thing, could have a great impact on the medical and scientific fields.

Recently, a paper entitled "Nanopasta - Electrospinning Nanofibers of White Flour" was published. It details the process of creating 370nm pasta which is less than 1/5000th of the size of traditional fettuccine (via University of London).

Okay, so what the team makes isn't exactly the same as the spaghetti you order in a restaurant. It's not made with egg and flour to make strands, which are then covered in sauce. It begins similarly but ends differently. A machine that uses a technique called 'electrospinning,' grabs flour threads and mixes them with liquid, before using an electrical charge to pulse the threads forward through a needle. This creates the spaghetti shape.

This means that the flour can be pushed without the need for a physical object, saving space. According to the paper, "by combining 17 wt% of flour with warm formic acid, cooling it, and then electrospinning it into porous mats containing 372 nm pasta fibers, a dope is created."

This is a much thinner and more efficient way to get spaghetti fibre than previous methods. It can be used for "next-generation bandaging or carbonized supercapacitor electrodes". It replaces the previous methods of obtaining starch for "biosourced nanofiber application", which is a series of words that I don't understand.

In the conclusion to the paper, the researchers make a cheeky 'um' by saying "as the newly-developed material consists fibers formed by extruding and drying flour, it can be defined as pasta." This is a dramatic undercutting of the previous record for thinnest pasta by about a thousandfold.

It's funny to accidentally set a world record, even if you won't use it to mop up the carbonara sauce any time soon. Next, I'll try the thinnest conchiglie in the world.