Snails' Teeth Beats Spider Silk as Nature's Strongest Material (2015)
69 points
1 hour ago
| 8 comments
| smithsonianmag.com
| HN
aeternum
12 minutes ago
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Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
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mattas
10 minutes ago
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"We dropped out of high school to build AI-powered snail teeth."
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WorldPeas
8 minutes ago
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imagine growing tools out of this stuff instead of forging or casting, that'd be neat.
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RajT88
1 hour ago
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> 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".

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rdtsc
15 minutes ago
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The main question is how many American football fields is that
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WorldPeas
10 minutes ago
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more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?

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

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boogieknite
1 hour ago
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whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke
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loloquwowndueo
1 hour ago
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Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
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fnordpiglet
1 hour ago
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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.
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eth0up
1 hour ago
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Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.
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djtriptych
10 minutes ago
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ok but what color is the yak hair?
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bell-cot
43 minutes ago
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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...

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functionmouse
21 minutes ago
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because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.
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CGMthrowaway
45 minutes ago
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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

?

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moffkalast
30 minutes ago
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But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?
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RobRivera
1 hour ago
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How many hogs to the bushel?
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tonymillion
1 hour ago
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> 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?

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mannykannot
3 minutes ago
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Why complicate matters with pasta at all when spider silk is, at least metaphorically and rhetorically, at hand?
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giwook
14 minutes ago
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Is it De Cecco though or some inferior brand like Barilla?
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riffic
17 minutes ago
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anything but the metric system.
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nathanfries
1 hour ago
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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.
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tyre
17 minutes ago
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This article is from 2015.
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hedgehog
1 hour ago
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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.

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horacemorace
15 minutes ago
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Garden snails around seattle will absolutely bite you (teeny tiny bite) and draw blood if you let them crawl around on your skin.
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deepsun
1 hour ago
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"try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.
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hedgehog
9 minutes ago
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It may have gotten a nibble but empirically I still have a finger :)
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Sharlin
1 hour ago
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Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
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aiisjustanif
36 minutes ago
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Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
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ziofill
1 hour ago
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> 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.

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somedude895
1 hour ago
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All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
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aitchnyu
1 hour ago
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imzadi
1 hour ago
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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.
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blipvert
1 hour ago
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Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!
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zarflax
36 minutes ago
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Makes you wonder how and why they evolved such strong teeth since crayons are pretty soft (and not even naturally-occurring).
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imzadi
53 minutes ago
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Oops
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black6
1 hour ago
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[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
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Sharlin
1 hour ago
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And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.
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codesnik
1 hour ago
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now, let's combine both.
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boothby
1 hour ago
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Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.
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cwmoore
1 hour ago
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Poor goats
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cwmoore
1 hour ago
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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.

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