Snails' Teeth Beats Spider Silk as Nature's Strongest Material (2015)
55 points - today at 4:37 PM
Source> 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".
CGMthrowaway
today at 5:46 PM
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
today at 6:01 PM
But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?
loloquwowndueo
today at 4:57 PM
Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
fnordpiglet
today at 5:00 PM
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.
Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.
boogieknite
today at 5:24 PM
whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke
RobRivera
today at 5:12 PM
How many hogs to the bushel?
tonymillion
today at 5:23 PM
> 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?
nathanfries
today at 4:58 PM
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.
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.
Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
"try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.
aiisjustanif
today at 5:55 PM
Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
> 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
today at 4:59 PM
All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
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.
Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!
Makes you wonder how and why they evolved such strong teeth since crayons are pretty soft (and not even naturally-occurring).
[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.
now, let's combine both.
Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.
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.