This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Debbie Ponchner.

Pineapples. Just thinking about this delicious tropical fruit,

rich in vitamin C, might make your mouth water.

But have you ever stopped to think

where the peel and other waste from this crop end up?

We do. Here in the small country of Costa Rica, the

world's largest producer of pineapples. Pineapple production generates about

four and a half million tons of crop

residues every year in our Central American nation and that ways this tough stuff.

The plant is made of strong cellulose that takes a long time to biodegrade, and most of it is either burnt or ends up dumped in open forests where disease causing mosquitoes and fungi thrive off its high sugar content. But hidden in

pineapple peals is a treasure of nanomaterials. Scientists at Costa Rica's National Laboratory of Nanotechnology,

Lanotec, have been extracting valuable nanosellulose from the peel and

stubble of the pineapple. This nanosellulose can be used in the pharmaceutical, food, and medical industries. And it turns out that while harvesting that nanose, you can also get rosette-like silica-based

micro particles. These tiny traces have potential as reinforcement in

adhesives in the biomedical field and even as a source of silica for fertilizers.

Scientists from Lanotech describe these applications in the journal Scientific reports.

Jose Vega-Waldrid is the director of Lanutek and one of the authors of the paper.

Pineapple residue is something that has been studied a lot but nobody had seen this

particle in the skin of the fruit. It was chemical engineer and material

scientists gendri Corrales urina who noticed the silica-based

micro particles.

I began to study the plant to make the cuts to see what it had,

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