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

black6

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

RajT88

> 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".

somedude895

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

imzadi

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.

hedgehog

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.

cwmoore

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.

ziofill

> 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.

aeternum

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

PowerElectronix

I thought it was limpet teeth

dukeofdoom

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

gste

Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band

GarnetFloride

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

pvaldes

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

bilsbie

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?

steve_adams_86

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

markstos

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