Snails' Teeth Beats Spider Silk as Nature's Strongest Material (2015)
69 points by simonebrunozzi 2 hours ago | 41 comments
aeternum 11 minutes ago
Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
replymattas 8 minutes ago
"We dropped out of high school to build AI-powered snail teeth."
replyWorldPeas 6 minutes ago
imagine growing tools out of this stuff instead of forging or casting, that'd be neat.
replyRajT88 2 hours ago
> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar
replyAh, 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".
WorldPeas 8 minutes ago
more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?
replyloloquwowndueo 2 hours ago
Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
replyfnordpiglet 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.
replybell-cot 41 minutes ago
Understandable, with how many there are to pick from, and the wiggle room in the longest ones -
replyhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/As...
functionmouse 19 minutes ago
because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.
replyCGMthrowaway 43 minutes ago
How about
reply> 10x stronger than the jaw of a dog
> 20x stronger than a human jaw
> as strong as the jaws of a great white shark
?
tonymillion 2 hours ago
> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar
replyIs that cooked or raw spaghetti?
mannykannot 40 seconds ago
Why complicate matters with pasta at all when spider silk is, at least metaphorically and rhetorically, at hand?
replynathanfries 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.
replyhedgehog 2 hours ago
I wanted to see some pictures, this paper has good ones:
replyhttps://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 13 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.
replyziofill 2 hours ago
> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar
replyWhat an odd example. A mid-sized car would have been much clearer.
imzadi 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.
replyblack6 2 hours ago
[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
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