Snails' Teeth Beats Spider Silk as Nature's Strongest Material (2015)

ssimonebrunozzi about 2 hours ago 47 commentsRead Article on smithsonianmag.com

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Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

aeternum•37 minutes ago

Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"

mattas•35 minutes ago

"We dropped out of high school to build AI-powered snail teeth."

WorldPeas•33 minutes ago

imagine growing tools out of this stuff instead of forging or casting, that'd be neat.

RajT88•about 2 hours ago

> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Ah, but how many one pound bags of concrete could it hold??

Why bags of anything? This is a poor way of communicating weight. Just say "a modern passenger car".

rdtsc•40 minutes ago

The main question is how many American football fields is that

akoboldfrying•15 minutes ago

12 nautical bushels per Fahrenheit

loloquwowndueo•about 2 hours ago

Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

Rooster61•5 minutes ago

Wait, I can do that? Here I've been using Smoots this whole time (with great difficulty might I add).

fnordpiglet•about 2 hours ago

It’s a real condition. For me it’s jet liners of various makes. I had to rewrite the quote as “0.005 Boeing 777’s” to be able to comprehend just how strong those snails teeth are.

eth0up•about 2 hours ago

Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.

bell-cot•about 1 hour ago

Understandable, with how many there are to pick from, and the wiggle room in the longest ones -

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/As...

WorldPeas•35 minutes ago

more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg

boogieknite•about 2 hours ago

whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke

kloop•22 minutes ago

whistles

3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

RobRivera•about 2 hours ago

How many hogs to the bushel?

CGMthrowaway•about 1 hour ago

How about

> 10x stronger than the jaw of a dog

> 20x stronger than a human jaw

> as strong as the jaws of a great white shark

moffkalast•about 1 hour ago

But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?

functionmouse•about 1 hour ago

because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.

tonymillion•about 2 hours ago

> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Is that cooked or raw spaghetti?

mannykannot•28 minutes ago

Why complicate matters with pasta at all when spider silk is, at least metaphorically and rhetorically, at hand?

As hinted at by its 2017 postscript, this article is a mess of incommensurable comparisons.

giwook•39 minutes ago

Is it De Cecco though or some inferior brand like Barilla?

riffic•42 minutes ago

anything but the metric system.

BLKNSLVR•13 minutes ago

1,497 one-kilogram bags of sugar.

Much better!

nathanfries•about 2 hours ago

I noticed that too. I feel like this might be a new way of laundering AI written text, just provide the quote verbatim as if the they believe it was actually written by the author.

tyre•43 minutes ago

This article is from 2015.

hedgehog•about 2 hours ago

I wanted to see some pictures, this paper has good ones:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10332

If you put your finger in front of a garden slug it may try to eat it, it's a very odd sand-paper sensation but I never knew why.

horacemorace•40 minutes ago

Garden snails around seattle will absolutely bite you (teeny tiny bite) and draw blood if you let them crawl around on your skin.

Sharlin•about 2 hours ago

Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.

deepsun•about 2 hours ago

"try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.

hedgehog•34 minutes ago

It may have gotten a nibble but empirically I still have a finger :)

aiisjustanif•about 1 hour ago

Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.

ziofill•about 1 hour ago

> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

What an odd example. A mid-sized car would have been much clearer.

somedude895•about 2 hours ago

All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.

aitchnyu•about 2 hours ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/AquaticSnails/search?q=teeth&restri...

BLKNSLVR•4 minutes ago

Old Reddit now seems to require login to read.

Further down the drain we go.

black6•about 2 hours ago

[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.

Sharlin•about 2 hours ago

And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.

codesnik•about 2 hours ago

now, let's combine both.

boothby•about 2 hours ago

Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.

ssl-3•12 minutes ago

I want an orangutan that slowly spins webs of extruded snail teeth.

cwmoore•about 2 hours ago

Poor goats

imzadi•about 2 hours ago

Snails had a good run being ignored by everyone but the French and now we're smearing their slime on our faces and trying to turn their teeth into armor.

blipvert•about 1 hour ago

Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

zarflax•about 1 hour ago

Makes you wonder how and why they evolved such strong teeth since crayons are pretty soft (and not even naturally-occurring).

imzadi•about 1 hour ago

Oops

cwmoore•about 2 hours ago

Which is the less intelligent? Strong works when dumb.

I know people like to talk about “how smart” the butterfly or whatever is for “adapting itself” to whatever environment, and it is cute, but there is a practical engineering choice between delicate design and brute force.