Noodles can be a great many things, such as a cheap, relatively nice instant meal, a slightly more expensive and delicious home-cooked meal, and … uh, an even costlier and (hopefully) tastier restaurant meal. OK, so they’re not all that versatile after all. However, Phys.org informs us that we can now add a new entry to our unofficial Noodle Hall of Fame: Noodles have inspired a brand new, super-tough, flexible synthetic tissue that is able to heal from damage and even “defend itself.” Now that’s impressive.

While this wasn’t some poor student forlornly staring at a bowl of instant ramen noodles and suddenly having a “eureka” moment, it’s still pretty close. One day, two scientists at the University of Chicago, Bozhi Tian and Yin Fang, were eating takeout noodles from a restaurant that prepared them in the style of Tian’s Chinese home town, Xi’an. These wheat noodles are stretched until they turn strong, flexible and chewy, which got the scientists thinking: Why does that happen? Shouldn’t overly stretched noodles become “thin and weak?” Eventually, they figured out this was because of starch granules, and by adding similar components to a recipe of synthetic tissue they were working on, they were able to create the kind of stretching, healing and self-defending effect the noodles had. This is a big deal, because it’s quite similar to how human skin behaves, and currently available synthetic tissues have been only able to mimic it partially. The new, noodle-inspired tissue, on the other hand, is significantly closer to the real deal. Go noodles!

A noodle incident

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