Say we consider a simple experiment of balancing a wooden rod on two fingers. The finger on the left, (1), will remain stationary, whereas the finger on the right, (2), will be moved toward the left.

Probably everyone is familiar with the phenomenon: water drops cling to a pane of glass, if it is tilted out of the horizontal plane. Only when a certain angle is reached they slide off. This raises ...

It’s no wonder earthquakes are so difficult to predict. Even simple laboratory simulations of the friction breakdowns that send tectonic plates lurching into motion are maddeningly difficult to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...