Robert Krulwich:

OK, this is an ad. I can’t vouch for it. I’m almost embarrassed to be showing it to you. But you have to take a look. When I saw it yesterday, I had to pick my jaw off the floor. This product, called “Ultra Ever Dry” is a nano-tech coating you can spray on any number of different surfaces, shoes, cinder blocks, coats. (Your hands? Probably not.) It’s superhydrophobic (it repels water) and oleophobic (repels hydrocarbons) — but words don’t do it justice.

[…]

Trolling various Internet sites, I found crazy questions, some of them sci-fi delightful. A guy wondered what would happen if he coated his boat with this stuff. If water is no longer a drag on your forward motion, maybe his boat would shoot through the water like a rocket. He wanted to try it. But when he wrote the company, they warned that at fast speeds, with less drag, “overall stability” might be affected. Meaning he’d get dunked.

Which raises another question. What if you coated yourself with this stuff and dove into a pool? Would you sink? Struggle? Hmm, thought one commenter, “Probably you get ejected from the pool.” Whooosh!

Nanotechnology is starting to get interesting.