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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Because of friction, sleds don't technically touch the snow and instead ride on a small layer of water created by the heat of the sled sliding down the hill. Sledding is one of many ways Wisconsinites ...

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 ...

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 ...