I'll be honest—friction is pretty complicated. Imagine that I have a block of wood sliding on a table. In some way, the atoms on the surface of the wood block are interacting with the surface atoms on ...

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, ...

Friction is responsible for about twenty percent of the world energy consumption. The main reason for this is that frictional forces slow down the motion of surfaces in contact: think of the moving ...

Sometimes you think you have a complete understanding of something and then BOOM—a simple problem throws everything out the window. Let's consider a very basic physics problem involving pushing a ...

In today's episode, Shini tells us about Static and Kinetic friction. Why is it hard to move a heavy bookcase across a carpeted floor? And why is it easier to keep it moving than it was to get it ...

Research led by a group from the University of Newcastle has found a new way to make silicone surfaces—and control how slippery they are. The work was published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

Is friction real? Once, with the quiet certainty of someone who just stayed up all night in the company of equations describing concrete, my college roommate told me that friction was made up. Now, ...

Through joint research with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Tokyo, NIMS for the first time experimentally demonstrated friction completely independent of sliding velocity—an ideal ...

From the early tribological studies of Leonardo da Vinci to Amontons’ law, friction has been shown to increase with increasing normal load. This trend continues to hold at the nanoscale, where ...