55 comments

  • aeternum an hour ago ago

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

    • hoppp 16 minutes ago ago

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

    • 1234letshaveatw 20 minutes ago ago

      Do snails scale?

    • mattas an hour ago ago

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

    • WorldPeas an hour ago ago

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

  • RajT88 3 hours ago 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".

    • loloquwowndueo 2 hours ago ago

      Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

      • fnordpiglet 2 hours ago 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 2 hours ago ago

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

          • djtriptych an hour ago ago

            ok but what color is the yak hair?

            • thenewwazoo 17 minutes ago ago

              Same color as the bike shed, obviously

      • Rooster61 34 minutes ago ago

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

      • bell-cot 2 hours ago 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...

    • rdtsc an hour ago ago

      The main question is how many American football fields is that

    • boogieknite 2 hours ago ago

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

      • bee_rider 10 minutes ago ago

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

    • inopinatus 24 minutes ago ago

      Well if they’re quoting that as the failure point then by definition it cannot.

    • WorldPeas an hour ago ago

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

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

    • kloop an hour ago ago

      whistles

      3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

    • RobRivera 2 hours ago ago

      How many hogs to the bushel?

    • CGMthrowaway 2 hours ago 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 an hour ago ago

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

    • functionmouse an hour ago ago

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

    • tonymillion 2 hours ago 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?

      • mannykannot an hour ago ago

        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.

      • giwook an hour ago ago

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

    • riffic an hour ago ago

      anything but the metric system.

      • BLKNSLVR 43 minutes ago ago

        1,497 one-kilogram bags of sugar.

        Much better!

    • nathanfries 2 hours ago 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 an hour ago ago

        This article is from 2015.

  • hedgehog 2 hours ago 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.

    • Sharlin 2 hours ago ago

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

    • deepsun 2 hours ago ago

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

      • hedgehog an hour ago ago

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

    • horacemorace an hour ago ago

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

    • aiisjustanif 2 hours ago ago

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

  • ziofill 2 hours ago 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 2 hours ago ago

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

  • PowerElectronix 30 minutes ago ago

    I thought it was limpet teeth

  • black6 3 hours ago ago

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

    • Sharlin 2 hours ago ago

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

    • codesnik 3 hours ago ago

      now, let's combine both.

      • boothby 2 hours ago ago

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

        • ssl-3 42 minutes ago ago

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

      • cwmoore 2 hours ago ago

        Poor goats

  • imzadi 2 hours ago 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.

    • bee_rider 8 minutes ago ago

      Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.

    • blipvert 2 hours ago ago

      Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

      • zarflax 2 hours ago ago

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

      • imzadi 2 hours ago ago

        Oops

  • cwmoore 2 hours ago 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.