25 comments

  • RajT88 an 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".

      CGMthrowaway 4 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

      ?

      boogieknite 27 minutes ago

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

      loloquwowndueo an hour ago

      Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

        fnordpiglet an 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 35 minutes ago

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

        bell-cot 2 minutes 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...

      RobRivera 39 minutes ago

      How many hogs to the bushel?

      tonymillion 27 minutes 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?

      nathanfries an 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.

  • hedgehog 38 minutes 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.

      deepsun 32 minutes ago

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

      Sharlin 34 minutes ago

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

  • ziofill 23 minutes 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 an hour ago

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

  • imzadi an 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 23 minutes ago

      Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

  • black6 an hour ago

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

      Sharlin 29 minutes ago

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

      codesnik an hour ago

      now, let's combine both.

        boothby an hour ago

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

        cwmoore 27 minutes ago

        Poor goats

  • cwmoore 31 minutes 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.