WASHINGTON, D.C. For Dr. Ethel Mizrick, her first day on the job as Assistant Project Scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration couldn’t have been more exciting. “I love space,” she says, a bit breathlessly, “and I REALLY love pasta!”
Mizrick is referring to the latest discovery by James Webb Space Telescope; a hitherto-unknown form of pasta, which will be named “Webbolini” in honor of the instrument that discovered it, the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever built.
Webbolini
“This throws much of pasta science into chaos,” said Emil Nostrand, Professor of Pasta Science at the University of Massachusetts-Seekonk. “Up until now the big controversy was whether there were as few as 10 or as many as 27 discrete forms of pasta. Now the debate has been elevated to whether there are between 11 and 28 types.”
James Webb Space Telescope competes at the Talladega Super Speedway
Pasta is a type of food typically made from unleavened dough of wheat flour mixed with water or eggs, then formed into shapes by either the universe’s “g-force” or hourly wage workers. “Some pasta shapes are out of this world,” says restaurant critic Evan Winstead of “Dine Out Chicago!” “Ditalini, Fusilli, Gemelli–there’s no way these are the products of human labor.”
James “Jimmy” Webb, songwriter-telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a super-modified stock car that can peer back over 13.5 billion years to see who was right, you or your wife, about when you went to Lake George, New York, on vacation. It is named after James “Jimmy” Webb, a songwriter known for such hits as “Wichita Lineman” and “Up, Up and Away,” who collects royalties for each picture taken by its near-infrared camera.
The newly-discovered pasta will be tested before it is released for human consumption, at which time NASA hopes that it takes its proper place of honor alongside other innovative consumer products that the nation’s space agency has developed, such as Tang, the orange-flavored drink mix, and Teflon, the non-stick, waterproof surface primarily used on pots and pans.
“People say our $33 billion annual budget is a lot of money,” says Dr. Mizrick, “but they shut up when they tuck into a hearty breakfast of Tang and perfectly-cooked fried eggs.”