5d ago

Sea snail teeth top Kevlar, titanium as world’s strongest material

www.cbc.ca /radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.2963357/sea-snail-teeth-top-kevlar-titanium-as-world-s-strongest-material-1.2963549

24 comments

I'm real tired of "strongest material" being thrown around. As a welder turned machinist, "strong" doesn't mean much of anything to me. Aluminum is plenty "strong" but it's softer than some woods. Tungsten carbide is harder than a coffin nail but you can chip it by looking at it funny sometimes. Kevlar is plenty tough, but it isn't hard or particularly flexible. There isn't any super material that will ever do all the things "the best" and throwing around meaningless titles for clickbait feels childish at best and exploitative at worst.
- You're forgetting that "strength" has a formalized engineering definition, which is the amout of force (not energy or impact) a material can resist before deforming or breaking.
  The other 2 properties you're alluding to are hardness (force needed per unit of deformation) and toughness (energy absorbed before deforming or breaking. All of these are important factors when choosing materials for a particular use case.
  The article is comparing the material to kevlar and spider silk, which suggests that they're referring to tensile strength, which is a proper use case. It isn't the paper's fault that your are incorrectly conflating "strongest" with "best". What's best for any particular use case is going to be dependent on design requirements.
  
  And you're forgetting that the chumps making these engineering definitions are chump engineers who think they're making parts in a theoretical plane of existence where only their numbers matter.
  In reality, everything should be made out of copper nickel superalloys because man that shit is cool af. Frfr if you ever get a chance to mess with aluminum copper nickel you should do it because that shit is borderline mystical.
- Obviously you've never heard of flex tape
  
  Duct tape and wd-40: the fifth and sixth classical elements.

The mineral in question (goethite - yup, named after the poet Goethe) is iron III oxide and hydroxide. It's 5~5.5 hardness in the Mohs scale, so it's softer than glass. The snail teeth is probably combining the goethite strains with proteins to make it so hard. I wonder if we couldn't sub the proteins with kevlar or another para-aramid to create something similar.