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 ...

Researchers found friction can occur without contact, driven by magnetic dynamics, and does not always increase with load. The effect could enable controllable, wear-free technologies.

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 ...

Really, this is the experiment I wanted to start on. How does friction work in Bad Piggies? Let me start with a quick summary of my experiments so far. Scale. For the size of stuff in Bad Piggies, I ...

When tectonic plates move, they rarely do so smoothly. Sometimes they slide almost imperceptibly; at other times, stress is ...

A good old game of carrom has really stood the test of time. Set up a board and people around will flock to it while practising their finger gymnastics. You may not have noticed but the game often ...

Friction is an intrinsic physical phenomenon to curling. Without it, objects in motion would move endlessly, without slowing down. This would cause many safety-related problems: Cars or trains could ...

Friction usually announces itself through contact. A chair scraping across a floor, a tire gripping asphalt, a hand sliding ...

Physicists in the US have made a peculiar discovery about how a small object slides over a rapidly rotating lubricated disk. They have found that if the object is tilted so that it only touches the ...