Self-cleaning walls, counter tops, fabrics, even micro-robots that can walk on water could be closer to reality because of research on super-hydrophobic materials by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and at Japan’s RIKEN institute.

Using the supercomputer at RIKEN (the fastest in the world when the research started in 2005), the team designed a computer simulation to perform tens of thousands of experiments that studied how surfaces behaved under many different conditions.