“Keep cool to reduce friction” might be the advice given to designers of nanoscale machinery by researchers who have just completed a study of factors influencing the formation of “water bridges” – ...

Technological limitations have made studying friction on the atomic scale difficult, but researchers have now made advances in that quest on two fronts. By speeding up a real atomic force microscope ...

Researchers at the University of Konstanz have uncovered a new mechanism of sliding friction: resistance to motion that arises without any mechanical contact, driven purely by collective magnetic ...

On April 30, 2018, on the eastern flank of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano, lava suddenly drained from a crater that had been spewing lava for more than three decades. Then the floor of the crater, named ...

Smooth wooden surface, such as a table or floor (If you do not have a wooden surface, you can use any other type of smooth countertop or table.) Rough carpeted surface (If you do not have access to ...

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 ...

An interdisciplinary research team of the Institutes of Physical Chemistry and Physics of the University of Freiburg and the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt-am-Main has discovered a ...