Farewell fog.

Soon you may be able to say goodbye to the mist that covers eyeglasses when it's warm and steamy. Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a coating that keeps glass surfaces fog-free.

When warm water vapor in the air comes into contact with cool surfaces like glass lenses and windows, the moist air often condenses into liquid droplets on the surface. These beads of fog obscure your view by limiting the amount of light that can pass through the glass, says Michael Rubner, a materials chemist at MIT. Light that does pass through gets scattered by the water beads, causing objects to appear blurry.

To clear things up, Rubner created a coating made of tiny glass nanoparticles. These particles, smaller than 100 nanometers (one billionth of a meter), are about one-millionth the size of a grain of sand. When a surface is coated with the particles, liquid droplets that would otherwise bead on the lens to form fog instead slide into the tiny spaces between the nanoparticles. Result: The condensing water smoothes into a thin layer that allows light to pass through without scattering.

Rubner hopes eyeglasses and car windshields will soon be covered with the coating, malting foggy views a thing of the past.