Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)

smithsonianmag.com

241 pointssimonebrunozzi171 comments

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.

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

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

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

Doesn't mean you were not bitten though.

If it wasn't accidental, that bite represents an attempt to bite.

It does mean they were not eaten.

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

A steel door is certainly harder than my skin and also certainly can't be used to "bite" me or puncture my skin (save for crushing it given enough force)

Just because you succeeded doesn't mean you didn't try.

Life is like a box of noodles

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

Garden snails around seattle will absolutely bite you (teeny tiny bite) and draw blood if you let them crawl around on your skin.

Beware of strongyloids. Or apparently to maintain complexity of taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiostrongyliasis

Or rat (snail/slug) lungworm

Any article with headings "Eye invasion" and "Lumbar puncture" is bound to be a good time.

A teenager in Australia died due to this after eating a dog slug as a dare.

I heard about that when it happened, but hadn’t realised it took nine years with a coma, paralysis, and seizures. It must’ve been horrifying for everyone involved, including the mates who dared him.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teen-paralysed-even...

Touchy subject and Im not commenting on this specific case that I have no idea about, but for this class of cases (ruptured spine, paralysis, coma) MAID seems better than prolonging life, especially if there’s no hope for full healthy recovery.

Perhaps they considered it, laws pertaining to it seem to be quite recent in Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_and_assisted_suicid...

> 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.

Must be a british thing?

well that's just £3300 then, yeah?

Half that, 3300 pounds of sugar is roughly 1800 quid (retail) and wholesale is probably half of that.

Well that's what ... 300 or so pints?

Wait beer in the UK is 11 quid per pint??? I know UK pints are bigger, but that seems really pricey

I estimated about 6 quid. We left £3300 behind because 3300 1-lb bags of sugar only costs £1800.

;) I like these easy breezy Late Friday threads!

Non, 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.

> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!

No, it’s 3,300 £1 bags of sugar, with undefined weight

Who's your sugar guy? I can get you a deal...

I can't wait until our LLM agents spot these and substitute in our own favorite, personally intuitive format conversions appropriate for the scale.

I'd like this to be expressed in units of pallet(s) of standard cinder blocks.

But everyone knows, by experience, what 3300 individual roughly one pound bags of sugar weighs and what sort of force is needed to hold it up. Mid sized car is ambiguous, and nobody saw anybody hold that up (seeing hulk doesn't count)

Do they? I don't recall ever seeing a bag of sugar in my life. I'm not a baker though so maybe that explains it.

A car is more easier to picture for me.

You must be from the US.

I am from the US and buy bags of sugar.

What else does sugar come in? If not bags? I don't think I've ever bought sugar in something other than a bag.

Buckets and pallets if you want more

I'm from Europe, I never buy sugar, why would I? I don't want more sugar in my diet.

Not Mary Berry, then. Or anyone else who ever baked a cake. Or cooked, really.

I hate sugar in food, but some recipes use sugar to balance acidity (e.g. tomato ketchup).

It looks like a bag of flour. So you know what it looks like, don’t play dumb.

I'm a guy who never cooks, I have no incentive to play dumb. I don't buy flour or sugar or other random raw ingredients in bulk. The closest I get is maybe a jar of coffee.

There you go, it looks like a jar with roughly 380 grams of coffee. Since you mention a jar, I assume you mean instant coffee. Your jar will be a bit taller than the packet of sugar with a similar surface area. A pound is a pound. It doesn’t matter if it’s 3300 pounds of feathers, or coffee, or sugar.

> Do they? I don't recall ever seeing a bag of sugar in my life. I'm not a baker though so maybe that explains it.

Do you not go to supermarkets or grocery stores?

You think people are better at estimating what 3300 bags of sugar look like - as opposed to estimating the size of a car?

How often has anyone ever seen 3300 bags of sugar together in their lives, do you think?

But what is it in football fields?

That's the usual measurement of size in the States and it's absolutely unbelievably ridiculous.

109m is a perfectly sensible measurement

Mid-sized European or American car?

The properly calibrated unit is a Volkswagen Beetle.

The kind the man who drives the snowplow drives?

And how old is it? A B-segment vehicle has gone from 1000kg (or less) to 1300kg (or a lot more for EVs) over the last 20 years.

It's not a question of where the car is from! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A one gram strand of noodle could not carry a 1 tonne car.

That depends. Is the spaghetti made of pure Italian semolina or some bastardized all-purpose flour-based dough? Also, the cut thickness matters as well as how much you salted the water to boil it AND for how long you boiled it. How far is it in the raw-al dente scale?

Both are in the same order of magnitude.

I'm guessing this was initially '1.5 metric tons', and through a number of helpful and friendly conversions, ended up at 3,300 sugar bags.

I also thought that was weird. Then I learned it gets better. If you click through to the BBC article that was apparently their main source, the quote is this:

> Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.

So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American. I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-white...

Or a lift full of people.

American people or Asian people?

If the lift is geometrically full of the (perhaps blended) mass of people, and race-dependent density is roughly similar, does it matter?

While I am totally with you on the bags of sugar, I am also unsure of the significance of a single thread of spaghetti!

Is that by weight? By volume? Are we comparing uncooked (brittle) or cooked (flexible)?

Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.

I can't at all understand what this comparison is meant to visualize for me, so it is obviously failing.

> Is that by weight? By volume?

It's holding up 3300 pounds. Pounds is a unit of weight.

> Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.

That's...kinda the point? We have something we don't give two thoughts about (slug tooth) comparable in scale to something not known for strength or tension resistance (spaghetti) holding up to something ginormous as if it's magic. Clearly, we should study slug teeth more!

Imagine if a strand of spaghetti can hold 3300 pounds. It's not possible with spaghetti but with slug teeth, it is! Now imagine the possibilities!

> imagine the possibilities!

Space elevator?

Does a 35,786 km "strand of [slug-tooth] spaghetti" hold its own weight?

But why a spaghetti? Why not your watch band? Or a shopping bag? Or your wedding ring? Or a spoon? Or kevlar strand?

I am talking about characteristics of a spaghetti strand all along, and wondering why was it chosen — does it compare in some way to a snail's tooth, like volume, weight or size?

It sounds like it is very arbitrary. Why would I even imagine it holding 1500kg in relation to a tooth.

You’re meant to visualize a strand as thin as spaghetti holding up an entire car. It’s an impressive visual. The properties of spaghetti (aside from its thickness) has nothing to do with anything here.

Ok, so you are saying that a strand the size of the spaghetti made of snail's tooth would be able to hold a car without breaking — got it, so we are using the volume of a spaghetti but made of this strong material instead.

This makes sense but it was totally not clear from the quote (in the article and posted here).

> 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".

Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

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.

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

ok but what color is the yak hair?

Same color as the bike shed, obviously

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.

White is so outdated.

I wish we'd stop ignoring Councilman Blatt's proposal to triple-dye the yak hair Imperial Blue, to minimize the color variation and therefore the effects of mass loss due to black body radation.

We are, after all, trying to be accurate here.

Pickups of Imperial Blue Yak Hair (or PIBYHs) is the clear road to the future and it's dismaying to see any other response from a fellow Unitsman.

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...

OP is talking about a football field, not a soccer field. It’s a common joke in America that things have to be measured in football terms.

In the “for what it’s worth” department, Brits called it soccer too. I have no idea why they swapped to football recently.

What's the size of football fields in use for the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) World Cup happening in USA (among others) right now?

You should ask the person I replied to - they already posted soccer field sizes.

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

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

It is not if all you know are football fields and not American football fields.

I still don’t know how they even compare.

That's why we use the %fill of an Olympic Sized Pool - doesn't matter from what continent the field comes, they fill the pool equally.

Aren't there significant differences in allowed depth (from minimum of 2m to maximum of 3m)?

Good catch. We've run into a problem somewhere along this journey of comparing the compression strength of a snails tooth to the tensile strength of a spiders web.

So a snail's tooth can only hold a 2m deep worth of Olympic pool (sea)water, but it breaks before you get to a 3m deep pool.

Only if you don’t understand that 3300 one pound bags of sugar is 3300 pounds. What an enlightening conversation here. Crème de la crème of modern thinkers.

Obviously it weighs 10,300 baseballs, which are 26 football fields long.

It turns out an astroturf American football field probably weighs 1700 tons, mostly from the 6 inches of stone base under the astroturf. So 3300lbs is .00097 football fields.

Approximately ten defensive linemen

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.

This article is from 2015.

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

Skynet is real

How many hogs to the bushel?

A hogshead is 6.768 bushels in the US and 7.875 in the UK.

> 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?

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

Barilla is fine and I will fight you

The pasta is fine. The owner doesn't like gay people.

Oh, thought this was a noodle fight. A full-on slam down in flavor town. An absolute buffet brawl.

Lol. Four-ish years ago I stopped cheaping out on house-brand pasta and bought Barilla. It was immediately a very obvious step-up in quality I can no longer keep cheaping out on.

Then they made some very slopjob AI ads. Superick but I keep buying them. :|

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Those are crushing power, and while they use bad terms for it, they are referring to tensile strength specifically, which is totally different. I don’t know why the hell they chose a spaghetti strand though.

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

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

anything but the metric system.

1,497 one-kilogram bags of sugar.

Much better!

~1.5 Mg of sugar.

Megagrams?? I like it.

The main question is how many American football fields is that

12 nautical bushels per Fahrenheit

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

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

whistles

3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

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/

"A modern passenger car" varies widely depending on what locale the reader is in. A passenger car in Jakarta is not at all the same as a passenger car in Los Angeles.

Can we just use Kilograms?

“NO!” - America

Needs to be 3,300 bags of something I care about. Otherwise you are talking about nonsense or voodoo.

The crazy thing is that it is also equivalent to 33,000 0.1 pound bags of sugar.

I think we're still in the right ballpark bit we're headed for the exits.

.1 lb sugar is 1.6 oz (net), and we'll need to wrap it in paper. I estimate about .5 of an ounce? So we're spending approximately 10% of the weight in packaging. Our nominal 33000 pounds of sugar just got 10% heavier.

At least we haven't resorted to those little sugar packets, which would be colossally worse!

It’s more like half a modern passenger car these days.

Yeah, a modern passenger car is such a good weight measure. So much more accurate than 3300 pounds. Are you for real?

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

now, let's combine both.

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

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

Poor goats

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

I 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.

If 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

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

https://old.reddit.com/r/AquaticSnails/search?q=teeth&restri...

Old Reddit now seems to require login to read.

Further down the drain we go.

Heard 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

just 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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740217

Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band

Toxoglossa is even better

Especially in the hard rock grindcore genre.

The original research paper:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article/12/105/20141...

The links given in TFA are broken.

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

Polymarket is currently taking bets on whether Snailman appears in the DC or Marvel universe first.

What a strange stupid time we live in, where that could actually be a thing.

And they are delicious. Just don't chew it too much. Much tastier than spider silk probably.

They 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?

Yeah, they're conflating strength, hardness and toughness all over the place.

Given 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.

Could this be scaled up for tunnel boring?

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.

Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

Oops

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

Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.

They ate all the vegetable plants.

I thought it was limpet teeth

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

Now we just need something to replace paper for a whole new rock-paper-scissors paradigm.

Next up: Lizard nails.

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

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

I dropped out of Kindergarten to make snail teeth powered AI!

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

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

Do snails scale?

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.

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

they're made of rock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethite

I hate the word democratizing

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.

Snails 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com