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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.
Garden snails around seattle will absolutely bite you (teeny tiny bite) and draw blood if you let them crawl around on your skin.
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.
Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
> 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.
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...
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)
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.
> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar
Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!
Mid-sized European or American car?
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.
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.
Or a lift full of people.
Must be a british thing?
> 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
whistles
3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot
> 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?
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
more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?
whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke
Needs to be 3,300 bags of something I care about. Otherwise you are talking about nonsense or voodoo.
The main question is how many American football fields is that
The crazy thing is that it is also equivalent to 33,000 0.1 pound bags of sugar.
How many hogs to the bushel?
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
?
"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?
It’s more like half a modern passenger car these days.
[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
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.
Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band
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.
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?
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 thought it was limpet teeth
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"
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.