Great Potential: An electron microscope image

A smooth, friction-free future may be in the offing - for machinery, that is. Prof. Reshef Tenne and his team in the Materials and Interfaces Department have created a new kind of lubricant that promises to cut friction in half. The synthetic material is made of inert, round molecules of tungsten disulfide. Says Tenne: "They just roll against each other and against the machinery parts, and don't stick to anything, like Teflon."

The synthetic molecule has a structure similar to the soccerball-like clusters of carbon atoms called fullerenes, or buckyballs, named after R. Buckminster Fuller, architect of the geodesic dome. Fullerenes were discovered in the last decade when a U.S.-British team of scientists noted that, under certain conditions, carbon atoms will cluster together to form a stable, hollow sphere. The discovery won the researchers the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.