10 comments

  • aeternum 1 minute ago
    Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
  • RajT88 1 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 3 minutes ago
      The main question is how many American football fields is that
    • boogieknite 56 minutes ago
      whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke
    • loloquwowndueo 1 hour ago
      Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
      • fnordpiglet 1 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 1 hour ago
          Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.
      • bell-cot 31 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 10 minutes ago
      because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.
    • CGMthrowaway 33 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 19 minutes ago
        But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?
    • riffic 5 minutes ago
      anything but the metric system.
    • RobRivera 1 hour ago
      How many hogs to the bushel?
    • tonymillion 56 minutes 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 2 minutes ago
        Is it De Cecco though or some inferior brand like Barilla?
    • nathanfries 1 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 6 minutes ago
        This article is from 2015.
  • hedgehog 1 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 4 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 1 hour ago
      Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
    • deepsun 1 hour ago
      "try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.
    • aiisjustanif 25 minutes ago
      Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
  • ziofill 52 minutes 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 1 hour ago
    All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
  • imzadi 1 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 52 minutes ago
      Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!
      • zarflax 24 minutes ago
        Makes you wonder how and why they evolved such strong teeth since crayons are pretty soft (and not even naturally-occurring).
      • imzadi 42 minutes ago
        Oops
  • black6 1 hour ago
    [2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
    • Sharlin 58 minutes ago
      And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.
    • codesnik 1 hour ago
      now, let's combine both.
      • boothby 1 hour ago
        Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.
      • cwmoore 56 minutes ago
        Poor goats
  • cwmoore 1 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.

  • nttylock 19 minutes ago
    [flagged]