Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)

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.

bell-cot• 12 days 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...

Rooster61• 12 days ago

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

isatty• 12 days ago

A football field is by far a better measurement than 3300 one pound bags of sugar.

rz2k• 12 days ago

Obviously it weighs 10,300 baseballs, which are 26 football fields long.

nrdvana• 11 days ago

It turns out an astroturf American football field probably weighs 1700 tons, mostly from the 6 inches of stone base under the astroturf. So 3300lbs is .00097 football fields.

drdec• 11 days ago

Approximately ten defensive linemen

nathanfries• 12 days 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• 12 days ago

This article is from 2015.

DarmokJalad1701• 12 days ago

The AI is so good that it traveled back to 2015 and published this paper.

RobRivera• 12 days ago

How many hogs to the bushel?

mminer237• 12 days ago

A hogshead is 6.768 bushels in the US and 7.875 in the UK.

tonymillion• 12 days 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?

giwook• 12 days ago

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

mannykannot• 12 days 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.

boogieknite• 12 days ago

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

bee_rider2• 12 days ago

Cheeks per tongue will now be used as the weirdest unit for “2.”

dylan6042• 12 days ago

just training the next gen LLMs with modern standards of measurements. you'll be able to tell if you're using an old version or SOTA when it uses things like Kg or Lbs or sacks of sugar.

CGMthrowaway• 12 days 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• 12 days ago

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

kulahan5• 12 days ago

Those are crushing power, and while they use bad terms for it, they are referring to tensile strength specifically, which is totally different. I don’t know why the hell they chose a spaghetti strand though.

functionmouse• 12 days ago

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

Terr_2• 12 days ago

Yeah, I am quite certain I have an easier time visualizing a one-pound bag of sugar—which I have seen at the grocery-store/kitchen/pantry—versus a single-pound bag of concrete.

riffic• 12 days ago

anything but the metric system.

BLKNSLVR2• 12 days ago

1,497 one-kilogram bags of sugar.

Much better!

rdtsc• 12 days ago

The main question is how many American football fields is that

akoboldfrying• 12 days ago

12 nautical bushels per Fahrenheit

WorldPeas2• 12 days ago

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

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

kloop• 12 days ago

whistles

3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

seany• 12 days ago

Staff Sgt. Sykes: [Sgt. Sykes is directing the recruits on how to judge distances] You take what you know, and then you multiply. Please don't use your dicks. They're too small, and I can't count that high. I don't wanna hear, "400,000 inches."

-Jarhead

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418763/

bdamm• 12 days ago

"A modern passenger car" varies widely depending on what locale the reader is in. A passenger car in Jakarta is not at all the same as a passenger car in Los Angeles.

Can we just use Kilograms?

alistairSH• 12 days ago

“NO!” - America

Isamu• 12 days ago

Needs to be 3,300 bags of something I care about. Otherwise you are talking about nonsense or voodoo.

eYrKEC2• 12 days ago

The crazy thing is that it is also equivalent to 33,000 0.1 pound bags of sugar.

nvader2• 12 days ago

I think we're still in the right ballpark bit we're headed for the exits.

.1 lb sugar is 1.6 oz (net), and we'll need to wrap it in paper. I estimate about .5 of an ounce? So we're spending approximately 10% of the weight in packaging. Our nominal 33000 pounds of sugar just got 10% heavier.

At least we haven't resorted to those little sugar packets, which would be colossally worse!

NetMageSCW2• 12 days ago

It’s more like half a modern passenger car these days.

throw12345678914• 11 days ago

Yeah, a modern passenger car is such a good weight measure. So much more accurate than 3300 pounds. Are you for real?

somedude895• 12 days ago

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

aitchnyu• 12 days ago

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

BLKNSLVR2• 12 days ago

Old Reddit now seems to require login to read.

Further down the drain we go.

imzadi2• 12 days 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• 12 days ago

Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

imzadi2• 12 days ago

Oops

zarflax• 12 days ago

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

bee_rider2• 12 days ago

Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.

dyauspitr2• 11 days ago

They ate all the vegetable plants.

hedgehog3• 12 days 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.

Sharlin2• 12 days ago

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

deepsun• 12 days ago

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

hedgehog3• 12 days ago

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

jayd16• 12 days ago

Just because it's harder doesn't mean it necessarily has the strength to tear off skin.

ozyschmozy• 12 days ago

A steel door is certainly harder than my skin and also certainly can't be used to "bite" me or puncture my skin (save for crushing it given enough force)

xboxnolifes• 12 days ago

Just because you succeeded doesn't mean you didn't try.

aiisjustanif• 12 days ago

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

horacemorace• 12 days ago

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

eth0up3• 12 days ago

Beware of strongyloids. Or apparently to maintain complexity of taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiostrongyliasis

Or rat (snail/slug) lungworm

cwmoore2• 12 days 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.

ziofill• 12 days 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.

flippyhead• 12 days ago

Must be a british thing?

natebc4• 12 days ago

well that's just £3300 then, yeah?

JsonDemWitOster3• 12 days ago

Non, du verstehst es falsch, mon amigo. According to EU standards (of which the Brits are no longer a part of) sugar bags (empty) should weigh exactly a pound each to withstand all and any shipping conditions.

IshKebab• 12 days ago

3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!

sph3• 12 days ago

No, it’s 3,300 £1 bags of sugar, with undefined weight

echelon• 12 days ago

I can't wait until our LLM agents spot these and substitute in our own favorite, personally intuitive format conversions appropriate for the scale.

I'd like this to be expressed in units of pallet(s) of standard cinder blocks.

zapkyeskrill• 12 days ago

But everyone knows, by experience, what 3300 individual roughly one pound bags of sugar weighs and what sort of force is needed to hold it up. Mid sized car is ambiguous, and nobody saw anybody hold that up (seeing hulk doesn't count)

saberience3• 12 days ago

Do they? I don't recall ever seeing a bag of sugar in my life. I'm not a baker though so maybe that explains it.

A car is more easier to picture for me.

jaapz• 12 days ago

You think people are better at estimating what 3300 bags of sugar look like - as opposed to estimating the size of a car?

How often has anyone ever seen 3300 bags of sugar together in their lives, do you think?

Loughla• 12 days ago

But what is it in football fields?

That's the usual measurement of size in the States and it's absolutely unbelievably ridiculous.

sph3• 12 days ago

Mid-sized European or American car?

antod3• 12 days ago

The properly calibrated unit is a Volkswagen Beetle.

necovek7• 12 days ago

And how old is it? A B-segment vehicle has gone from 1000kg (or less) to 1300kg (or a lot more for EVs) over the last 20 years.

xeonmc• 12 days ago

It's not a question of where the car is from! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A one gram strand of noodle could not carry a 1 tonne car.

JsonDemWitOster3• 12 days ago

That depends. Is the spaghetti made of pure Italian semolina or some bastardized all-purpose flour-based dough? Also, the cut thickness matters as well as how much you salted the water to boil it AND for how long you boiled it. How far is it in the raw-al dente scale?

Tagbert• 11 days ago

Both are in the same order of magnitude.

kbelder• 12 days ago

I'm guessing this was initially '1.5 metric tons', and through a number of helpful and friendly conversions, ended up at 3,300 sugar bags.

bjt• 12 days ago

I also thought that was weird. Then I learned it gets better. If you click through to the BBC article that was apparently their main source, the quote is this:

Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.

So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American. I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-white...

benoau• 12 days ago

Or a lift full of people.

Razengan• 12 days ago

American people or Asian people?

necovek7• 12 days ago

While I am totally with you on the bags of sugar, I am also unsure of the significance of a single thread of spaghetti!

Is that by weight? By volume? Are we comparing uncooked (brittle) or cooked (flexible)?

Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.

I can't at all understand what this comparison is meant to visualize for me, so it is obviously failing.

yallpendantools• 12 days ago

Is that by weight? By volume?

It's holding up 3300 pounds. Pounds is a unit of weight.

Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.

That's...kinda the point? We have something we don't give two thoughts about (slug tooth) comparable in scale to something not known for strength or tension resistance (spaghetti) holding up to something ginormous as if it's magic. Clearly, we should study slug teeth more!

Imagine if a strand of spaghetti can hold 3300 pounds. It's not possible with spaghetti but with slug teeth, it is! Now imagine the possibilities!

dyauspitr2• 11 days ago

You’re meant to visualize a strand as thin as spaghetti holding up an entire car. It’s an impressive visual. The properties of spaghetti (aside from its thickness) has nothing to do with anything here.

aeternum• 12 days ago

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

mattas• 12 days ago

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

hackeraccount• 11 days ago

I dropped out of Kindergarten to make snail teeth powered AI!

WorldPeas2• 12 days ago

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

Terr_2• 12 days ago

There's some overlap here with the dental problem of tooth enamel, another kind of wonderful biomaterial.

1234letshaveatw• 12 days ago

Do snails scale?

ArmadilloGang• 12 days ago

They certainly scale the fence my wife put around the garden. Then again, we haven’t done a good job of patching holes in the perimeter. Our DevOps team is too busy playing in the sprinkler to learn to read, let alone automate patching, but it’s on the board for next sprint.

hoppp• 12 days ago

Just find the proteins involved then manufacture them with yeast. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy

culi• 12 days ago

they're made of rock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethite

eunos• 12 days ago

I hate the word democratizing

PowerElectronix• 12 days ago

I thought it was limpet teeth

bravoetch• 12 days ago

Same thing, they clarify it right at the start of the very short article.

dukeofdoom• 12 days ago

Snails also make for very cool manuscript decorations. Not sure what those monks were smoking...maybe snails

gste• 12 days ago

Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band

pvaldes2• 12 days ago

Toxoglossa is even better

antod3• 12 days ago

Especially in the hard rock grindcore genre.

GarnetFloride• 12 days ago

Now we just need something to replace paper for a whole new rock-paper-scissors paradigm.

pvaldes2• 12 days ago

And they are delicious. Just don't chew it too much. Much tastier than spider silk probably.

bilsbie2• 12 days ago

They say they’re taking about tensile strength at the footnote. But teeth would be more likely to be compressively strong. They don’t get pulled on much.

The whole thing seems very confused. Anyway let’s build space elevator?

antod3• 12 days ago

Yeah, they're conflating strength, hardness and toughness all over the place.

NetMageSCW2• 12 days ago

Given what they are talking about (mollusk tongue scraping rock) tensile strength is appropriate. The mollusk does f crush food between teeth - its teeth are on its tongue and scraped across rock.

bilsbie2• 11 days ago

Could this be scaled up for tunnel boring?

steve_adams_86• 12 days ago

If you ever watch these guys in an aquarium, you notice they're basically constantly chewing on things. I've wondered many times how they keep such tiny teeth in good condition if they never given them a rest, but, here's why. Nature creates such cool creatures

markstos• 12 days ago

Polymarket is currently taking bets on whether Snailman appears in the DC or Marvel universe first.

latexr4• 12 days ago

What a strange stupid time we live in, where that could actually be a thing.

nullbio• 12 days ago

Next up: Lizard nails.

cechmaster• 12 days ago

Snails are so cool! I’ve been using snail cream to fix a skin issue on my face with great success. There is nothing like it that I have tried. A little goes a long way.

adrian_b• 11 days ago

The original research paper:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article/12/105/20141...

The links given in TFA are broken.

meristohm• 11 days ago

I learned about snail teeth in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey! It's a lovely, shortish nonfiction book about a woman with a rare infection that affects her nervous system and has her mostly in bed for years, during which time she observes a snail on her nightstand (that a well-meaning friend brought in from the woods) and then does a deep-dive into mollusks thanks to public-library books. I read this to my child and was inspired to lie down in a field and listen to a slug chewing on plants, tchk-tchk-tchk.

Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)

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