71 comments

  • hedgehog 3 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 2 hours 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 3 hours ago

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

    • deepsun 3 hours ago

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

      • jayd16 10 minutes ago

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

      • hedgehog 2 hours ago

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

        • dylan604 an hour ago

          Doesn't mean you were not bitten though.

    • aiisjustanif 3 hours ago

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

  • ziofill 3 hours 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.

    • IshKebab 6 minutes ago

      > 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

      Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!

    • flippyhead 11 minutes ago

      Must be a british thing?

  • RajT88 4 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".

    • loloquwowndueo 4 hours ago

      Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

      • isatty 6 minutes ago

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

      • fnordpiglet 4 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 3 hours ago

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

          • djtriptych 2 hours ago

            ok but what color is the yak hair?

            • thenewwazoo an hour ago

              Same color as the bike shed, obviously

            • eth0up 19 minutes ago

              Not from Unitzikstan I see

              White, of course; that way the statisticians can dye them any color they want. But for ultra high precision I do recommend the Boeing system. But be sure to use the older models, before private equity firms replaced all the metal parts with zipties. If you can't find a quality Boeing (plausible), consider 1.1 Blue Whales (tricky).

              fnordpiglet was being deliberately humble with the decimals. It's accurate down to the semi firkin. Not to be confused with a quarter Tod.

              Ignore the redundant bike shed comment, as that fits precisely 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar. Anyone with a bike should know that.

      • Rooster61 2 hours ago

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

      • bell-cot 3 hours 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...

    • kloop 2 hours ago

      whistles

      3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

    • boogieknite 3 hours ago

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

      • dylan604 an hour 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.

      • bee_rider an hour ago

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

    • rdtsc 2 hours ago

      The main question is how many American football fields is that

    • WorldPeas 2 hours ago

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

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

    • CGMthrowaway 3 hours 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 2 hours ago

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

    • RobRivera 3 hours ago

      How many hogs to the bushel?

    • seany 33 minutes 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/

    • tonymillion 3 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 2 hours 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 2 hours ago

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

    • functionmouse 2 hours ago

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

      • Terr_ 26 minutes ago

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

    • riffic 2 hours ago

      anything but the metric system.

    • nathanfries 4 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.

      • DarmokJalad1701 24 minutes ago

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

      • tyre 2 hours ago

        This article is from 2015.

  • gste an hour ago

    Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band

  • somedude895 4 hours ago

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

  • black6 4 hours ago

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

    • Sharlin 3 hours ago

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

    • codesnik 4 hours ago

      now, let's combine both.

      • boothby 4 hours ago

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

        • ssl-3 2 hours ago

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

      • cwmoore 3 hours ago

        Poor goats

  • dukeofdoom an hour ago

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

  • PowerElectronix 2 hours ago

    I thought it was limpet teeth

    • bravoetch 42 minutes ago

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

  • imzadi 3 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 3 hours ago

      Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

      • zarflax 3 hours ago

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

      • imzadi 3 hours ago

        Oops

    • bee_rider an hour ago

      Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.

  • cwmoore 3 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.

  • aeternum 2 hours ago

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

    • hoppp an hour ago

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

    • mattas 2 hours ago

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

    • 1234letshaveatw an hour ago

      Do snails scale?

      • ArmadilloGang 44 minutes 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.

    • eunos an hour ago

      I hate the word democratizing

    • WorldPeas 2 hours ago

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

      • Terr_ 30 minutes ago

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