218 pointsby simonebrunozziJul 10, 2026

19 Comments

black6Jul 10, 2026
[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
codesnikJul 10, 2026
now, let's combine both.
boothbyJul 10, 2026
Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.
ssl-3Jul 10, 2026
I want an orangutan that slowly spins webs of extruded snail teeth.
cwmooreJul 10, 2026
Poor goats
SharlinJul 10, 2026
And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.
RajT88Jul 10, 2026
> 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".

loloquwowndueoJul 10, 2026
Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
fnordpigletJul 10, 2026
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.
eth0upJul 10, 2026
Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.
djtriptychJul 10, 2026
ok but what color is the yak hair?
thenewwazooJul 10, 2026
Same color as the bike shed, obviously
eth0upJul 10, 2026
Not from Unitzikstan I see

White, of course; that way the statisticians can dye them any color they want. But for ultra high precision I do recommend the Boeing system. But be sure to use the older models, before private equity firms replaced all the metal parts with zipties. If you can't find a quality Boeing (plausible), consider 1.1 Blue Whales (tricky).

fnordpiglet was being deliberately humble with the decimals. It's accurate down to the semi firkin. Not to be confused with a quarter Tod.

Ignore the redundant bike shed comment, as that fits precisely 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar. Anyone with a bike should know that.

bell-cotJul 10, 2026
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...

kulahanJul 10, 2026
OP is talking about a football field, not a soccer field. It’s a common joke in America that things have to be measured in football terms.

In the “for what it’s worth” department, Brits called it soccer too. I have no idea why they swapped to football recently.

necovekJul 11, 2026
What's the size of football fields in use for the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) World Cup happening in USA (among others) right now?
kulahanJul 11, 2026
You should ask the person I replied to - they already posted soccer field sizes.
Rooster61Jul 10, 2026
Wait, I can do that? Here I've been using Smoots this whole time (with great difficulty might I add).
isattyJul 10, 2026
A football field is by far a better measurement than 3300 one pound bags of sugar.
sphJul 10, 2026
It is not if all you know are football fields and not American football fields.

I still don’t know how they even compare.

bchJul 10, 2026
That's why we use the %fill of an Olympic Sized Pool - doesn't matter from what continent the field comes, they fill the pool equally.
necovekJul 11, 2026
Aren't there significant differences in allowed depth (from minimum of 2m to maximum of 3m)?
bchJul 11, 2026
Good catch. We've run into a problem somewhere along this journey of comparing the compression strength of a snails tooth to the tensile strength of a spiders web.
necovekJul 11, 2026
So a snail's tooth can only hold a 2m deep worth of Olympic pool (sea)water, but it breaks before you get to a 3m deep pool.
rz2kJul 10, 2026
Obviously it weighs 10,300 baseballs, which are 26 football fields long.
nrdvanaJul 11, 2026
It turns out an astroturf American football field probably weighs 1700 tons, mostly from the 6 inches of stone base under the astroturf. So 3300lbs is .00097 football fields.
drdecJul 11, 2026
Approximately ten defensive linemen
nathanfriesJul 10, 2026
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.
tyreJul 10, 2026
This article is from 2015.
DarmokJalad1701Jul 10, 2026
The AI is so good that it traveled back to 2015 and published this paper.
michaelmroseJul 10, 2026
Skynet is real
RobRiveraJul 10, 2026
How many hogs to the bushel?
mminer237Jul 10, 2026
A hogshead is 6.768 bushels in the US and 7.875 in the UK.
tonymillionJul 10, 2026
> 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?

giwookJul 10, 2026
Is it De Cecco though or some inferior brand like Barilla?
kulahanJul 10, 2026
Barilla is fine and I will fight you
RajT88Jul 10, 2026
The pasta is fine. The owner doesn't like gay people.
kulahanJul 10, 2026
Oh, thought this was a noodle fight. A full-on slam down in flavor town. An absolute buffet brawl.
JsonDemWitOsterJul 11, 2026
Lol. Four-ish years ago I stopped cheaping out on house-brand pasta and bought Barilla. It was immediately a very obvious step-up in quality I can no longer keep cheaping out on.

Then they made some very slopjob AI ads. Superick but I keep buying them. :|

mannykannotJul 10, 2026
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.

boogiekniteJul 10, 2026
whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke
bee_riderJul 10, 2026
Cheeks per tongue will now be used as the weirdest unit for “2.”
dylan604Jul 10, 2026
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.
CGMthrowawayJul 10, 2026
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

?

moffkalastJul 10, 2026
But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?
kulahanJul 10, 2026
Those are crushing power, and while they use bad terms for it, they are referring to tensile strength specifically, which is totally different. I don’t know why the hell they chose a spaghetti strand though.
functionmouseJul 10, 2026
because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.
Terr_Jul 10, 2026
Yeah, I am quite certain I have an easier time visualizing a one-pound bag of sugar—which I have seen at the grocery-store/kitchen/pantry—versus a single-pound bag of concrete.
rifficJul 10, 2026
anything but the metric system.
BLKNSLVRJul 10, 2026
1,497 one-kilogram bags of sugar.

Much better!

BobaFloutistJul 10, 2026
~1.5 Mg of sugar.
natebcJul 10, 2026
Megagrams?? I like it.
rdtscJul 10, 2026
The main question is how many American football fields is that
akoboldfryingJul 10, 2026
12 nautical bushels per Fahrenheit
WorldPeasJul 10, 2026
more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg

kloopJul 10, 2026
whistles

3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

seanyJul 10, 2026
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

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418763/

bdammJul 10, 2026
"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?

alistairSHJul 10, 2026
“NO!” - America
IsamuJul 10, 2026
Needs to be 3,300 bags of something I care about. Otherwise you are talking about nonsense or voodoo.
eYrKEC2Jul 10, 2026
The crazy thing is that it is also equivalent to 33,000 0.1 pound bags of sugar.
nvaderJul 11, 2026
I think we're still in the right ballpark bit we're headed for the exits.

.1 lb sugar is 1.6 oz (net), and we'll need to wrap it in paper. I estimate about .5 of an ounce? So we're spending approximately 10% of the weight in packaging. Our nominal 33000 pounds of sugar just got 10% heavier.

At least we haven't resorted to those little sugar packets, which would be colossally worse!

NetMageSCWJul 10, 2026
It’s more like half a modern passenger car these days.
somedude895Jul 10, 2026
All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
aitchnyuJul 10, 2026
BLKNSLVRJul 10, 2026
Old Reddit now seems to require login to read.

Further down the drain we go.

ticulatedsplineJul 10, 2026
Heard they were rolling this out, hasn't happened to me yet. wonder if it's a soft wall or simply rolled out to certain areas/IPs
stronglikedanJul 10, 2026
just refresh a couple times, or try in private mode. I've seen it once a week or so ago and then it went away for good so far
imzadiJul 10, 2026
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.
blipvertJul 10, 2026
Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!
imzadiJul 10, 2026
Oops
zarflaxJul 10, 2026
Makes you wonder how and why they evolved such strong teeth since crayons are pretty soft (and not even naturally-occurring).
bee_riderJul 10, 2026
Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.
dyauspitrJul 11, 2026
They ate all the vegetable plants.
hedgehogJul 10, 2026
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.

SharlinJul 10, 2026
Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
deepsunJul 10, 2026
"try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.
hedgehogJul 10, 2026
It may have gotten a nibble but empirically I still have a finger :)
dylan604Jul 10, 2026
Doesn't mean you were not bitten though.
recursiveJul 10, 2026
If it wasn't accidental, that bite represents an attempt to bite.
Brian_K_WhiteJul 11, 2026
It does mean they were not eaten.
jayd16Jul 10, 2026
Just because it's harder doesn't mean it necessarily has the strength to tear off skin.
ozyschmozyJul 10, 2026
A steel door is certainly harder than my skin and also certainly can't be used to "bite" me or puncture my skin (save for crushing it given enough force)
xboxnolifesJul 10, 2026
Just because you succeeded doesn't mean you didn't try.
nvaderJul 11, 2026
Life is like a box of noodles
aiisjustanifJul 10, 2026
Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
horacemoraceJul 10, 2026
Garden snails around seattle will absolutely bite you (teeny tiny bite) and draw blood if you let them crawl around on your skin.
eth0upJul 10, 2026
Beware of strongyloids. Or apparently to maintain complexity of taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiostrongyliasis

Or rat (snail/slug) lungworm

hedgehogJul 10, 2026
Any article with headings "Eye invasion" and "Lumbar puncture" is bound to be a good time.
EdwardDiegoJul 10, 2026
A teenager in Australia died due to this after eating a dog slug as a dare.
latexrJul 11, 2026
I heard about that when it happened, but hadn’t realised it took nine years with a coma, paralysis, and seizures. It must’ve been horrifying for everyone involved, including the mates who dared him.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teen-paralysed-even...

sashank_1509Jul 11, 2026
Touchy subject and Im not commenting on this specific case that I have no idea about, but for this class of cases (ruptured spine, paralysis, coma) MAID seems better than prolonging life, especially if there’s no hope for full healthy recovery.
latexrJul 11, 2026
Perhaps they considered it, laws pertaining to it seem to be quite recent in Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_and_assisted_suicid...

cwmooreJul 10, 2026
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.

ziofillJul 10, 2026
> 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.

flippyheadJul 10, 2026
Must be a british thing?
natebcJul 10, 2026
well that's just £3300 then, yeah?
tucnakJul 10, 2026
Half that, 3300 pounds of sugar is roughly 1800 quid (retail) and wholesale is probably half of that.
natebcJul 10, 2026
Well that's what ... 300 or so pints?
dmoyJul 10, 2026
Wait beer in the UK is 11 quid per pint??? I know UK pints are bigger, but that seems really pricey
natebcJul 10, 2026
I estimated about 6 quid. We left £3300 behind because 3300 1-lb bags of sugar only costs £1800.

;) I like these easy breezy Late Friday threads!

JsonDemWitOsterJul 11, 2026
Non, du verstehst es falsch, mon amigo. According to EU standards (of which the Brits are no longer a part of) sugar bags (empty) should weigh exactly a pound each to withstand all and any shipping conditions.
IshKebabJul 10, 2026
> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!

sphJul 10, 2026
No, it’s 3,300 £1 bags of sugar, with undefined weight
naruhodoJul 11, 2026
Who's your sugar guy? I can get you a deal...
echelonJul 10, 2026
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.

zapkyeskrillJul 10, 2026
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)
saberienceJul 10, 2026
Do they? I don't recall ever seeing a bag of sugar in my life. I'm not a baker though so maybe that explains it.

A car is more easier to picture for me.

ninalanyonJul 10, 2026
You must be from the US.
dmoyJul 10, 2026
I am from the US and buy bags of sugar.

What else does sugar come in? If not bags? I don't think I've ever bought sugar in something other than a bag.

paradox460Jul 11, 2026
Buckets and pallets if you want more
saberienceJul 11, 2026
I'm from Europe, I never buy sugar, why would I? I don't want more sugar in my diet.
B1FF_PSUVMJul 11, 2026
Not Mary Berry, then. Or anyone else who ever baked a cake. Or cooked, really.

I hate sugar in food, but some recipes use sugar to balance acidity (e.g. tomato ketchup).

ValentineCJul 11, 2026
> Do they? I don't recall ever seeing a bag of sugar in my life. I'm not a baker though so maybe that explains it.

Do you not go to supermarkets or grocery stores?

jaapzJul 10, 2026
You think people are better at estimating what 3300 bags of sugar look like - as opposed to estimating the size of a car?

How often has anyone ever seen 3300 bags of sugar together in their lives, do you think?

LoughlaJul 10, 2026
But what is it in football fields?

That's the usual measurement of size in the States and it's absolutely unbelievably ridiculous.

AlohaJul 11, 2026
109m is a perfectly sensible measurement
sphJul 10, 2026
Mid-sized European or American car?
antodJul 10, 2026
The properly calibrated unit is a Volkswagen Beetle.
paradox460Jul 11, 2026
The kind the man who drives the snowplow drives?
necovekJul 11, 2026
And how old is it? A B-segment vehicle has gone from 1000kg (or less) to 1300kg (or a lot more for EVs) over the last 20 years.
xeonmcJul 11, 2026
It's not a question of where the car is from! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A one gram strand of noodle could not carry a 1 tonne car.
JsonDemWitOsterJul 11, 2026
That depends. Is the spaghetti made of pure Italian semolina or some bastardized all-purpose flour-based dough? Also, the cut thickness matters as well as how much you salted the water to boil it AND for how long you boiled it. How far is it in the raw-al dente scale?
TagbertJul 11, 2026
Both are in the same order of magnitude.
kbelderJul 10, 2026
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.
bjtJul 10, 2026
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...

benoauJul 11, 2026
Or a lift full of people.
RazenganJul 11, 2026
American people or Asian people?
nodoodlesJul 11, 2026
If the lift is geometrically full of the (perhaps blended) mass of people, and race-dependent density is roughly similar, does it matter?
necovekJul 11, 2026
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.

yallpendantoolsJul 11, 2026
> Is that by weight? By volume?

It's holding up 3300 pounds. Pounds is a unit of weight.

> Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.

That's...kinda the point? We have something we don't give two thoughts about (slug tooth) comparable in scale to something not known for strength or tension resistance (spaghetti) holding up to something ginormous as if it's magic. Clearly, we should study slug teeth more!

Imagine if a strand of spaghetti can hold 3300 pounds. It's not possible with spaghetti but with slug teeth, it is! Now imagine the possibilities!

B1FF_PSUVMJul 11, 2026
> imagine the possibilities!

Space elevator?

Does a 35,786 km "strand of [slug-tooth] spaghetti" hold its own weight?

dyauspitrJul 11, 2026
You’re meant to visualize a strand as thin as spaghetti holding up an entire car. It’s an impressive visual. The properties of spaghetti (aside from its thickness) has nothing to do with anything here.
aeternumJul 10, 2026
Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
mattasJul 10, 2026
"We dropped out of high school to build AI-powered snail teeth."
hackeraccountJul 11, 2026
I dropped out of Kindergarten to make snail teeth powered AI!
WorldPeasJul 10, 2026
imagine growing tools out of this stuff instead of forging or casting, that'd be neat.
Terr_Jul 10, 2026
There's some overlap here with the dental problem of tooth enamel, another kind of wonderful biomaterial.
1234letshaveatwJul 10, 2026
Do snails scale?
ArmadilloGangJul 10, 2026
They certainly scale the fence my wife put around the garden. Then again, we haven’t done a good job of patching holes in the perimeter. Our DevOps team is too busy playing in the sprinkler to learn to read, let alone automate patching, but it’s on the board for next sprint.
hopppJul 10, 2026
Just find the proteins involved then manufacture them with yeast. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy
culiJul 10, 2026
eunosJul 10, 2026
I hate the word democratizing
PowerElectronixJul 10, 2026
I thought it was limpet teeth
bravoetchJul 10, 2026
Same thing, they clarify it right at the start of the very short article.
dukeofdoomJul 10, 2026
Snails also make for very cool manuscript decorations. Not sure what those monks were smoking...maybe snails
gsteJul 10, 2026
Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band
pvaldesJul 10, 2026
Toxoglossa is even better
antodJul 10, 2026
Especially in the hard rock grindcore genre.
GarnetFlorideJul 10, 2026
Now we just need something to replace paper for a whole new rock-paper-scissors paradigm.
pvaldesJul 10, 2026
And they are delicious. Just don't chew it too much. Much tastier than spider silk probably.
bilsbieJul 10, 2026
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?

antodJul 10, 2026
Yeah, they're conflating strength, hardness and toughness all over the place.
NetMageSCWJul 10, 2026
Given what they are talking about (mollusk tongue scraping rock) tensile strength is appropriate. The mollusk does f crush food between teeth - its teeth are on its tongue and scraped across rock.
bilsbieJul 11, 2026
Could this be scaled up for tunnel boring?
steve_adams_86Jul 10, 2026
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
markstosJul 11, 2026
Polymarket is currently taking bets on whether Snailman appears in the DC or Marvel universe first.
latexrJul 11, 2026
What a strange stupid time we live in, where that could actually be a thing.
nullbioJul 11, 2026
Next up: Lizard nails.
cechmasterJul 11, 2026
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.
adrian_bJul 11, 2026
The original research paper:

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

The links given in TFA are broken.