Snail Teeth Dethrone Spider Silk as Nature's Strongest Material
Snails' Teeth Beats Spider Silk as Nature's Strongest Material
I explore how marine snail teeth, specifically from limpets, have been discovered to be five times stronger than spider silk. These teeth, composed of goethite nanofibers in a protein matrix, can withstand pressures comparable to turning carbon into diamond. This breakthrough reveals the strongest natural material on Earth, offering engineers new inspiration for creating ultra-strong, flexible materials that surpass Kevlar and rival high-quality carbon fibers.
Tests in the lab revealed that it can withstand pressure that would turn carbon into diamond.
- hedgehog
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.
- ziofill
> 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.
- RajT88
> 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".
- black6
[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
- meristohm
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.
- steve_adams_86
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
- somedude895
All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
- gste
Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band