11 comments

  • aeternum 1 hour ago
    Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
    • hoppp 21 minutes ago
      Just find the proteins involved then manufacture them with yeast. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy
    • 1234letshaveatw 25 minutes ago
      Do snails scale?
    • mattas 1 hour ago
      "We dropped out of high school to build AI-powered snail teeth."
    • WorldPeas 1 hour ago
      imagine growing tools out of this stuff instead of forging or casting, that'd be neat.
  • RajT88 2 hours 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
      Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
      • fnordpiglet 2 hours 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
          Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.
          • djtriptych 1 hour ago
            ok but what color is the yak hair?
            • thenewwazoo 22 minutes ago
              Same color as the bike shed, obviously
      • Rooster61 40 minutes ago
        Wait, I can do that? Here I've been using Smoots this whole time (with great difficulty might I add).
      • bell-cot 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      The main question is how many American football fields is that
    • boogieknite 2 hours ago
      whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke
      • dylan604 2 minutes ago
        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.
      • bee_rider 15 minutes ago
        Cheeks per tongue will now be used as the weirdest unit for “2.”
    • inopinatus 30 minutes ago
      Well if they’re quoting that as the failure point then by definition it cannot.
    • WorldPeas 1 hour 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 57 minutes ago
      whistles

      3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

    • RobRivera 2 hours ago
      How many hogs to the bushel?
    • CGMthrowaway 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
        But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?
    • functionmouse 1 hour ago
      because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.
    • tonymillion 2 hours 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
        Is it De Cecco though or some inferior brand like Barilla?
    • riffic 1 hour ago
      anything but the metric system.
      • BLKNSLVR 48 minutes ago
        1,497 one-kilogram bags of sugar.

        Much better!

    • nathanfries 2 hours 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 1 hour ago
        This article is from 2015.
  • hedgehog 2 hours 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
      Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
    • deepsun 2 hours ago
      "try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.
      • hedgehog 1 hour ago
        It may have gotten a nibble but empirically I still have a finger :)
    • horacemorace 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
  • ziofill 2 hours 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
    All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
  • PowerElectronix 35 minutes ago
    I thought it was limpet teeth
  • black6 2 hours ago
    [2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
    • Sharlin 2 hours ago
      And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.
    • codesnik 2 hours ago
      now, let's combine both.
      • boothby 2 hours ago
        Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.
        • ssl-3 47 minutes ago
          I want an orangutan that slowly spins webs of extruded snail teeth.
      • cwmoore 2 hours ago
        Poor goats
  • imzadi 2 hours 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 13 minutes ago
      Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.
    • blipvert 2 hours ago
      Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!
      • zarflax 1 hour ago
        Makes you wonder how and why they evolved such strong teeth since crayons are pretty soft (and not even naturally-occurring).
      • imzadi 1 hour ago
        Oops
  • cwmoore 2 hours 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 1 hour ago
    [flagged]