OK, time to read another mainstream science article with a vague unscientific term like “strongest” in the title. Maybe it’s just the title that’s bad and the article will clear it up?

Now the snails have upped their tough-guy street cred

Oh jeez…

snails’ teeth are made of the strongest natural material out there

You want to define what strongest means in this context up front? You know, like scientists tend to do for their terms?

No?

Spider silk, often compared to kevlar, has wowed with its tough yet flexible powers.

Spider silk is not a superhero. It doesn’t have “powers.” You probably meant properties but that doesn’t sound as cool does it?

And “compared to” kevlar in what ways? You can compare tons of things but not all comparisons are helpful.

But when tested, the tooth material was, on average, about five times stronger than most spider silk, reports BBC News.

What tests did they do that it was five times stronger in? They gave it a math test and measured its emotional resolve?

“Most spider silk” which ones? Did the paper not say? Not even “the top 10 strongest spider silks” or something, just “most” of them?

Jesus fucking Christ.

This makes it the strongest natural material on Earth.

Can you motivate this conclusion at least a little? Because from what I’ve read so far I don’t have enough information to believe you or call bullshit.

Tests in the lab revealed that it can withstand pressure that would turn carbon into diamond.

Gee whiz! Sure would have been nice to have some numbers and units with that because most people don’t know how much pressure it takes to turn carbon into diamond.

Also, you can’t turn carbon “into” diamond because diamond is a form of carbon. It’d be like me saying I turned a pidgeon into a bird. Did you mean graphite into diamond maybe?

Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Yeah but how many one-pound bags of feathers could the spaghetti hold up?

Also, didn’t know the cross sectional area of spaghetti was so standardised it can replace actual measurements.

This is a comparison you’d read in the Pokédex, of a C-tier Pokémon no one gives a shit about.

Also you were talking about pressure a second ago but now you’re talking about tension? Those aren’t the same for a given material.

And there are also two rare, natural materials that can withstand more stress than diamond

Now you’re talking about stress???

wurtzite boron nitrate—has a diamond-like arrangement at the atomic level.

[…]

lonsdaleite—is all carbon but has a hexagonal structure. (Diamond’s cubic.)

So you think we’re stupid enough to need spaghetti as a unit but we’re supposed to just know what arrangement diamond has at the atomic level?

Why is this article so inconsistent with the background knowledge it assumes we have?

Hard and strong-yet-flexible materials offer attractive properties for engineers looking to build the next generation of materials

Ah yes, they need materials to build… materials.

I kind of get what they’re saying but it’s worded so awkwardly and doesn’t inspire confidence in the article.

the terminology in this story could cause confusion for some readers. There are many different scientific terms used to describe an object’s capacity to resist bending or breaking apart, each of which has subtle differences. In this article, we use the terms toughness and strength to refer to the object’s tensile strength—the capacity of an object to resist pulling apart. This differs from compressive strength, which describes the amount of squeezing an object could withstand. The above discussion of wurtzite boron nitrate refers to not to tensile strength but the hardness of the material, which is its capacity to resist scratching or cutting.

Love that they went to the effort of saying that but didn’t see fit to actually rework the article.

It’s science “journalists” like these that help perpetuate science denialism among the public by making science seem like just a bunch of morons screwing around drawing whatever conclusion they feel like, instead of the rigorous, disciplined process it actually is.

The ‘Editor’s Note April 5, 2017’ basically makes the story defunct.

They’re comparing the tensile strength of spider silk to the compressive strength [or hardness?] of snails’ teeth.

Snail teeth sounds like a novelty product or a reagent in a magic spell