Now I get to do something with that force scale I built. I had a request some time ago to talk about friction. Friction is surprisingly complicated. When two surfaces rub against each other, why is ...

Technological limitations have made studying friction on the atomic scale difficult, but researchers have now made advances in that quest on two fronts. By speeding up a real atomic force microscope ...

Say we consider a simple experiment of balancing a wooden rod on two fingers. The finger on the left, (1), will remain stationary, whereas the finger on the right, (2), will be moved toward the left.

“Dragging” ultracold ions across an optical lattice has provided important insights into friction. By tweaking the distance between the ions, Alexei Bylinskii, Dorian Gangloff and Vladan Vuletić of ...

This article has been updated to include comments from Raymond Goldstein and Patrick Warren. It is a mathematical puzzle that stumped Galileo, but researchers in France think they have discovered how ...

A popular brand of angel hair pasta is helping researchers experimentally to understand the friction forces that occur in an earthquake fault and providing better information than current numerical ...

Here’s the rub with friction — scientists don’t really know how it works. Although humans have been harnessing its power since rubbing two sticks together to build the first fire, the physics of ...

It's perhaps the second week of your introductory physics course. Your instructor starts talking about friction and writes the following two formulas on the board. Then there is probably some sort of ...

Whenever you get around to doing dishes, how easily water slides down a dirty plate depends on how uneven and crusty the plate’s surface is. At the nanoscale, however, where surface features can be ...