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Re:'Bloodworms' harvest copper for metal jaws by lukeschantz on Friday April 29, 2022 @09:22PM (#31212504)
The Xenomorph from the Alien’s franchise extracts iron from blood of its host. That is where it gets the metal for its teeth. Not explicitly stated in the films but something mentioned in one of the books.
Re:'Bloodworms' harvest copper for metal jaws by RodgerTheGreat on Friday April 29, 2022 @10:33PM (#31212857)
Given that a human body contains about 3-5 grams of iron total, those teeth must be smaller than they look.
Re:'Bloodworms' harvest copper for metal jaws by burnished on Saturday April 30, 2022 @02:18AM (#31213811)
My extremely rough math suggests 282-470 people go into the making of those teeth, assuming xenomorph teeth are roughly 10x the volume of a human tooth (5-6 mL) and that they have thirty of them, no losses, and we're talking pure elemental iron and not a protein/metal matrix or otherwise. Figure 7.8 g/mL as the density of iron, by 6 mL per tooth is roughly 47g per tooth, so in the ballpark of 10-15 humans worth of iron per tooth. Humans have 32 teeth and 30 seems as good as any other number, so 47g/tooth by 30 teeth is 1410g of iron. That gives us somewhere between 282-470 people per set of xenomorph teeth.

I don't know where exactly I was going with this but it was fun to estimate.

Re:'Bloodworms' harvest copper for metal jaws by WJW on Saturday April 30, 2022 @02:48AM (#31213939)
They just eat tons and tons of people.
Re:'Bloodworms' harvest copper for metal jaws by lukeschantz on Friday April 29, 2022 @10:44PM (#31212906)
It’s almost as if the Aliens story universe is fictional, bruh.