35 comments

  • RajT88 an hour 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".

    • rdtsc 4 minutes ago

      The main question is how many American football fields is that

    • boogieknite an hour ago

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

    • loloquwowndueo an hour ago

      Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

      • fnordpiglet an hour 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 an hour ago

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

      • bell-cot 33 minutes 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...

    • functionmouse 11 minutes ago

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

    • CGMthrowaway 34 minutes 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 20 minutes ago

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

    • riffic 7 minutes ago

      anything but the metric system.

    • RobRivera an hour ago

      How many hogs to the bushel?

    • tonymillion an hour 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 3 minutes ago

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

    • nathanfries an hour 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 7 minutes ago

        This article is from 2015.

  • aeternum 2 minutes ago

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

  • hedgehog an hour 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 5 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.

    • Sharlin an hour ago

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

    • deepsun an hour ago

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

    • aiisjustanif 26 minutes ago

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

  • ziofill an hour 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.

  • somedude895 an hour ago

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

  • imzadi an hour 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 an hour ago

      Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

      • zarflax 25 minutes ago

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

      • imzadi 43 minutes ago

        Oops

  • black6 an hour ago

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

    • Sharlin an hour ago

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

    • codesnik an hour ago

      now, let's combine both.

      • boothby an hour ago

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

      • cwmoore an hour ago

        Poor goats

  • cwmoore an hour 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.