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 ...

Working together to study friction on the atomic scale, researchers at UC Merced and the University of Pennsylvania have conducted the first atomic-scale experiments and simulations of friction at ...

A new analysis of the 2018 collapse of Kilauea volcano's caldera helps to confirm the reigning scientific paradigm for how friction works on earthquake faults. The model quantifies the conditions ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 best part about living in Vermont is that we get to experience all of the seasons. Sometimes cool weather appears out of nowhere and we don’t have the proper attire so we rub our hands together to ...

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 ...