There is a need for the development of wear-resistant, low-friction materials, and understanding the fundamental origins of wear across length scales will be necessary to guide the development of such materials. The events at buried interfaces that lead to wear entail extreme variability in interaction strength, contact duration, and frequency of occurrence. It has been long postulated that the ensemble of these transient interactions at weak buried interfaces ultimately lead to the ever-present macroscopic phenomena of wear. The quest to find high performance solid lubrication solutions continues. Traditional solid lubrication techniques rely on a pre-deposited coating of a lubricous and/or a protective material, but since these materials wear during operation, the life of the system is finite. In order to extend the operational life indefinitely and to potentially negate any mechanical contributions to wear, a stable lubricating tribofilm of sufficient chemistry and thickness must be maintained during operation. However, because sliding occurs in a buried interface, it has proven challenging to determine what materials processes are actively enabling stable performance and/or what to add to the system to improve lubrication. In this talk, results from a number of ultra-low wear systems (polymers, metals, and ceramics) that have been studied using a variety of active and in situ tribological instrumentation will be presented, along with a discussion of the various mechanisms that we believe to be responsible for this unique behavior.