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Argonne scientists used Mira to identify and improve a new mechanism for eliminating friction, which fed into the development of a hybrid material that exhibited superlubricity at the macroscale for the first time. Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) researchers helped enable the groundbreaking simulations by overcoming a performance bottleneck that doubled the speed of the team's code.
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They were amazed by what the computer simulations revealed. When the lubricant materials--graphene and diamond-like carbon (DLC)--slid against each other, the graphene began rolling up to form hollow cylindrical "scrolls" that helped to practically eliminate friction. These so-called nanoscrolls represented a completely new mechanism for superlubricity, a state in which friction essentially disappears.
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Superlubricity is a highly desirable property. Considering that nearly one-third of every fuel tank is spent overcoming friction in automobiles, a material that can achieve superlubricity would greatly benefit industry and consumers alike. Such materials could also help increase the lifetime of countless mechanical components that wear down due to incessant friction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @08:22AM
And more importantly, when. I bet the answer is "it's 20 years away". (eternally) So by the time we get fusion energy, flying cars, computers that don't hang...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @09:18AM
The reason we don't have flying cars is not that we couldn't build them. All the needed technology exists. Indeed, even prototypes have been demonstrated. If they were economically viable, we could start production in a short time frame. However they are simply not economically viable.
Also the reason why we don't have computers that don't hang is mostly economical (yes, there's the halting problem, but that you cannot tell for every algorithm whether it halts neither means that there are not large classes of algorithms where we can tell it, nor does it imply that the problems in everyday computing cannot be solved by such algorithms). For all the bugs which have appeared in airplane software, have you ever heard of an airplane whose flight computer simply hang?
So from your list, the only thing that remains is fusion.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @10:53AM
There's another factor to include in the flying cars side of things:
humans have enough trouble dealing with the physics of surface bound vehicles, imagine the boy racers zipping around in the sky....
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday July 23 2015, @05:48PM
Reminds me of Treasure Planet. :-)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"