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

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

> 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".

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

[flagged]

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

I thought it was limpet teeth

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

Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band

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

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?

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

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

Next up: Lizard nails.

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.

The original research paper:

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

The links given in TFA are broken.

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.