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Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)
- cechmaster 3mo agoSnails 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.
- black6 3mo ago[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
- RajT88 3mo 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".
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoIt’s more like half a modern passenger car these days.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoSorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
- fnordpiglet 3mo agoIt’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 3mo agoSorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.
- djtriptych 3mo agook but what color is the yak hair?
- thenewwazoo 3mo agoSame color as the bike shed, obviously
- eth0up 3mo agoNot 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.
- somedude895 3mo agoAll I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- aitchnyu 3mo agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/AquaticSnails/search?q=teeth&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on https://old.reddit.com/r/AquaticSnails/search?q=teeth&restri...
- BLKNSLVR 3mo agoOld Reddit now seems to require login to read. Further down the drain we go.
- ticulatedspline 3mo agoHeard they were rolling this out, hasn't happened to me yet. wonder if it's a soft wall or simply rolled out to certain areas/IPs
- stronglikedan 3mo agojust refresh a couple times, or try in private mode. I've seen it once a week or so ago and then it went away for good so far
- latexr 3mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740217
- imzadi 3mo agoSnails 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.
- hedgehog 3mo agoI wanted to see some pictures, this paper has good ones: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10332 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.
- Sharlin 3mo agoAnalogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
- deepsun 3mo ago"try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.
- hedgehog 3mo agoIt may have gotten a nibble but empirically I still have a finger :)
- dylan604 3mo agoDoesn't mean you were not bitten though.
- recursive 3mo agoIf it wasn't accidental, that bite represents an attempt to bite.
- Brian_K_White 3mo agoIt does mean they were not eaten.
- jayd16 3mo agoJust because it's harder doesn't mean it necessarily has the strength to tear off skin.
- cwmoore 3mo agoWhich 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 3mo 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 3mo agoMust be a british thing?
- natebc 3mo agowell that's just £3300 then, yeah?
- JsonDemWitOster 3mo agoNon, 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nttylock 3mo ago[flagged]
- aeternum 3mo agoNext YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
- mattas 3mo ago"We dropped out of high school to build AI-powered snail teeth."
- hackeraccount 3mo agoI dropped out of Kindergarten to make snail teeth powered AI!
- WorldPeas 3mo agoimagine growing tools out of this stuff instead of forging or casting, that'd be neat.
- Terr_ 3mo agoThere's some overlap here with the dental problem of tooth enamel, another kind of wonderful biomaterial.
- 1234letshaveatw 3mo agoDo snails scale?
- ArmadilloGang 3mo agoThey 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 3mo agoJust find the proteins involved then manufacture them with yeast. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoI thought it was limpet teeth
- bravoetch 3mo agoSame thing, they clarify it right at the start of the very short article.
- dukeofdoom 3mo agoSnails also make for very cool manuscript decorations. Not sure what those monks were smoking...maybe snails
- gste 3mo agoLimpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band
- GarnetFloride 3mo agoNow we just need something to replace paper for a whole new rock-paper-scissors paradigm.
- pvaldes 3mo agoAnd they are delicious. Just don't chew it too much. Much tastier than spider silk probably.
- bilsbie 3mo agoThey 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?
- antod 3mo agoYeah, they're conflating strength, hardness and toughness all over the place.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoGiven 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.
- bilsbie 3mo agoCould this be scaled up for tunnel boring?
- steve_adams_86 3mo agoIf 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 3mo agoPolymarket is currently taking bets on whether Snailman appears in the DC or Marvel universe first.
- latexr 3mo agoWhat a strange stupid time we live in, where that could actually be a thing.
- nullbio 3mo agoNext up: Lizard nails.
- adrian_b 3mo agoThe original research paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article/12/105/20141326/35390/Extreme-strength-observed-in-limpet-teethExtreme https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article/12/105/20141... The links given in TFA are broken.
- meristohm 3mo agoI 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.