aeternum 26 minutes ago

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

  • mattas 24 minutes ago

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

  • WorldPeas 21 minutes ago

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

RajT88 1 hour 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 1 hour ago

    Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

    • fnordpiglet 1 hour 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 1 hour ago

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

        • djtriptych 24 minutes ago

          ok but what color is the yak hair?

  • nathanfries 1 hour 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 31 minutes ago

      This article is from 2015.

  • RobRivera 1 hour ago

    How many hogs to the bushel?

  • tonymillion 1 hour 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?

    • giwook 27 minutes ago

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

    • mannykannot 16 minutes 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.

  • boogieknite 1 hour ago

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

  • CGMthrowaway 58 minutes 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 44 minutes ago

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

  • functionmouse 35 minutes ago

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

  • riffic 30 minutes ago

    anything but the metric system.

    • BLKNSLVR 1 minute ago

      1,497 one-kilogram bags of sugar.

      Much better!

  • rdtsc 28 minutes ago

    The main question is how many American football fields is that

  • kloop 10 minutes ago

    whistles

    3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

hedgehog 1 hour 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 1 hour ago

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

  • deepsun 1 hour ago

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

    • hedgehog 22 minutes ago

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

  • aiisjustanif 49 minutes ago

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

  • horacemorace 29 minutes ago

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

ziofill 1 hour 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.

black6 1 hour ago

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

  • codesnik 1 hour ago

    now, let's combine both.

    • boothby 1 hour ago

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

  • Sharlin 1 hour ago

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

imzadi 1 hour 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.

  • blipvert 1 hour ago

    Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

    • zarflax 49 minutes ago

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

cwmoore 1 hour 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.