Researchers have demonstrated how to entirely suppress static friction between two surfaces. This means that even a minuscule force suffices to set objects in motion. Especially in micromechanical ...

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 ...

Purdue University physics professor Erica Carlson explains why static electricity is worse in winter and offers practical ...

How can a horde of active robots be automatically brought to a standstill? By arresting their dynamics in a self-sustained way. This phenomenon was discovered by physicists at Heinrich Heine ...

1.1 What is friction? Take this everyday example: when a coffee mug rests on a flat table, the kinetic frictional force is zero. There is no force trying to move the mug across the table, so there is ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you have ever been near a train when it starts to move, you see (and hear) something interesting. The engine car at the front starts to move and in doing so, you get this wave of compressing ...