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

Measurement analogies and unit jokes

• Many comments mock the article’s use of “3,300 one‑pound bags of sugar” and “a strand of spaghetti” as analogies.
• Alternative “units” proposed: modern passenger cars, football fields, Olympic pools, Smoots, Boeing 777s, blue whales, defensive linemen, pallets of cinder blocks, pints of beer, hogsheads/bushels, and even “cheeks per tongue.”
• Some argue bags of sugar are relatable (common in kitchens); others have never seen them and find cars or lifts of people clearer.
• There is confusion between U.S. and U.K. pounds, metric vs imperial, and whether such analogies help at all.

Material properties and article issues

• Several note the article (and even a source article) mixes up tensile strength, compressive strength, hardness, and toughness.
• Teeth are intuitively thought to be strong in compression, yet the limpet/snail teeth discussed work by scraping rock, so tensile strength might indeed be relevant.
• The spaghetti comparison is widely seen as odd and unclear, especially without specifying raw vs cooked pasta.

Biology, images, and behavior

• Readers seek pictures of snail/limpet teeth and share links to research and image-rich papers.
• Some describe the sensation of snails or slugs “biting” fingers as sandpaper-like, with debate over whether this actually breaks skin or just feels rough.
• Garden snails in some regions reportedly can give tiny bites that draw blood.

Health risks and ethics

• A tangent covers parasitic infection from snails/slugs (rat lungworm), including a case where eating a slug as a dare led to years of severe disability and death.
• This sparks brief discussion of medical assistance in dying for cases with no hope of recovery.

Applications and speculative ideas

• Commenters imagine biomimetic uses: armor, tools grown instead of forged, tunnel-boring tech, even space elevators made from snail-tooth–like materials.
• There is playful startup/YC-style satire about “democratizing” snail-tooth materials and scaling production via biotech.