Without the force called friction, cars would skid off the roadway, humans couldn't stride down the sidewalk, and objects would tumble off your kitchen counter and onto the floor. Even so, how ...

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 ...

A suspended apparatus used to minimize friction during the experiment. The heavier brass cylinder and lighter ping-pong ball collide repeatedly against the transparent wall, reproducing 31 collisions ...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — To evade friction, try taking a quantum shortcut. Two teams of physicists are building tiny machines designed to operate with the maximum possible efficiency. According to ...

I learned to respect friction, as a phenomenon with many nuances, when I was a graduate student. One day, while teaching a problem session in elementary mechanics, I unwisely invented a new problem to ...

Memory fault: friction study could provide new insights into why earthquakes happen. (Courtesy: iStock/allanswort) Experiments by Sam Dillavou and Shmuel Rubinstein at Harvard University have, for the ...

The ice in a domestic freezer is remarkably different from the single crystals that form in snow clouds, or even those formed ...

Wear has major impacts on everything from the bearing of a wind power plant to an artificial hip joint. However, the exact cause of wear is still unclear. Scientists now show that the effect occurs at ...

From the discovery of gravity to the first mission to defend Earth from an asteroid, here are the most important physics experiments that changed the world. When you purchase through links on our site ...