Most wear-resistant metal alloy in the world engineered at Sandia National Laboratories Yeah, it's 90% platinum and 10% gold, but it sounds like it may still be a bargain. For some reason, the linked article talks about making tires out of the stuff -- by way of observing that, after skidding for a full mile, such a tire would have shed one atomic layer of material. Or, to put it another way, you could run a coin made of the stuff across hundreds of counters before it started showing any "rub on the high points". Oh, yeah, and while they were measuring its wear properties, they found it forming a mysterious black film. It was breaking down organic matter from the environment, and turning it into diamond-like carbon, tiny particles as slippery as graphite but as hard as diamond. It's very useful in industry, but you need to use vacuum plasma gear to produce it, and it takes forever. Or, apparently, you can just rub this new alloy with not-especially-clean fingers.
