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

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

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

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

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...

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.

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)

Mid-sized European or American car?

> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!

Must be a british thing?

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.

Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

whistles

3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot

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

The main question is how many American football fields is that

Needs to be 3,300 bags of something I care about. Otherwise you are talking about nonsense or voodoo.

The crazy thing is that it is also equivalent to 33,000 0.1 pound bags of sugar.

more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?

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

"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?

How many hogs to the bushel?

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

?

> 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?

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

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/

anything but the metric system.

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.

Yeah, they're conflating strength, hardness and toughness all over the place.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AquaticSnails/search?q=teeth&restri...

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

now, let's combine both.

Especially in the hard rock grindcore genre.

Toxoglossa is even better

Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!

Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.

Same thing, they clarify it right at the start of the very short article.

Just find the proteins involved then manufacture them with yeast. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy

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

Do snails scale?

I hate the word democratizing

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