http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160427-the-amazing-chemistry-of-candyfloss
Candyfloss – or cotton candy to Americans – is a singular sort of confection. The fluffy carnival treat is like nothing else edible. What else feels lighter than air in your hand and seems to evaporate once it gets past your lips, leaving only sweetness and red dye? When you're a kid – or sometimes an adult, let's be real – it ranks up there with astronaut ice cream in the hierarchy of fascinating treats.
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Candyfloss begins as solid sugar, which is poured into a little hopper with a heating element. Surrounding the mouth of the hopper is a ring pierced with minuscule holes; surrounding that is a big metal receptacle a lot like an oversized cake pan. As the heating element melts the sugar into a liquid, a motor sets the whole contraption spinning.
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And it just so happens that this method of making a solid web from a liquid material has potential medical applications:
Scientists at Vanderbilt University (also, by coincidence, in Nashville) are using a candyfloss machine to help build scaffolds for growing cells in, as part of an effort to create artificial tissues.
One trouble with the gels currently used by scientists studying this is that they aren't always as porous as one would like, so cells can't populate them completely. The Vanderbilt team used their machine to spin a cloud of polymers, embedded them in a gel, and then caused them to dissolve, leaving behind an intricate network of vessels.
Ninety percent of the cells encouraged to take up residence in this structure were alive a week later, compared to 60-70% of those in gels without vessels.
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