 Create a 12-meter yacht that can win back the America's Cup for the United States was an achievement realized by skipper Dennis Conner, his winning team, and the boat stars and stripes on February 4th, 1987. Many enthusiasts felt that the loss of the America's Cup four years earlier to the Australians was due to a failure to keep up with the latest technology. In an effort to ensure that the Americans had the faster boat in the final rounds of this year's competition, many changes were made. The design team, led by John Marshall, elected to make use of a new drag reduction technology called riblets, developed by NASA's Langley Research Center and manufactured by the 3M Company. These sheets of thin vinyl plastic placed on the underside of stars and stripes are actually glued with microscopic scratches or riblets that form the perfect triangular peaks and valleys running the entire length of the boat. John Marshall explains. The boat itself looks a little bit like the space shuttle in the sense that the surface is paved with these separate plaques of riblet material rather than having a meticulously smooth surface. This is an intentionally rough surface and it is the microscopic roughness that makes it work and that leads to testable drag reductions in a variety of different research. By placing a small section of the 3M riblet film under a high-powered microscope, it's easy to see the riblets and their near-perfect triangular grooves. The idea for riblets came out of research to modify airplanes so they moved through the air with less resistance. The same researchers also found that some sharks have riblet-like skin that allows them to glide effortlessly through the water, according to Langley's Ben Andrews. We noted from some Russian literature that certain sharks have a structure, a skin structure, very similar to a riblet structure. You look at these things under a microscope, they're tiny V-shaped grooves aligned with the flow of the right scale according to our wind tunnel experiments to reduce drag. Only the fast sharks have these, the slow sharks do not. It was engineer Mike Walsh who originated research on riblets at Langley. The microscopic V-grooves were first studied on machined aluminum plates in this low-speed wind tunnel. 3M then developed a way to put riblets on vinyl. Test samples of the riblet film have been flown by Boeing aircraft company and aboard a NASA-leared jet to confirm its efficiency. According to Ben Andrews, the reduction of skin friction by riblets is on the order of 6 to 8 percent and that translates directly into savings for the airline industry. We estimate the savings for the U.S. commercial airline fleet at roughly $300 million dollars per year. Since it's lighter than paint, 3M is also looking at the riblet material as a protective coating for our plants. Because the technology is new, there are still many unanswered questions, but scientists feel that riblets can be used in a host of applications, from natural gas pipelines to submarines and race cars. NASA's riblet technology, a high-tech solution that helps keep America on the competitive edge.