Scientists have explored friction at the microscopic level. They discovered that the force generating friction is much stronger than previously thought. The discovery is an important step toward ...

Step inside the strange world of a superfluid, a liquid that can flow endlessly without friction, defying the common-sense ...

Friction is hard to predict and control, especially since surfaces that come in contact are rarely perfectly flat. New experiments demonstrate that the amount of friction between two silicon surfaces, ...

A microscopic model describing frictional forces between a tip and a surface near its melting point predicts different behaviour for grazing friction compared with ploughing friction On a macroscopic ...

Chemists and physicists at the University of Amsterdam shed light on a crucial aspect of friction: how things begin to slide. Using fluorescence microscopy and dedicated fluorescent molecules, they ...

At a busy street crossing, people wait for the signal to change. When one person steps out first, others soon follow. Scientists in Amsterdam have found that this same kind of behavior happens at a ...

For nearly two centuries, textbooks blamed icy spills on pressure and friction, but new simulations tell another story. The ...

On a macroscopic scale, the physics of friction is well understood: skiers do their utmost to minimize it whereas racecar drivers hang on to it desperately during high-speed cornering. Yet, the ...

Editor’s note: I found this article to be a very refreshing and different way of looking at a battery than most EEs are used to. Although it is fairly basic, I realize that in our audience there are ...

The friction between a silicon ball and silicon wafer was measured in the experimental set-up shown on the left. The new research demonstrates that there is a direct relation between two effects: the ...