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 ...

Humans have been making fire using friction for thousands of years, with evidence of its use found in archaeological records across different cultures worldwide. Fire by friction is a testament to ...

Earlier, we saw that the work done by friction on a particle sliding on a rough surface is negative, causing a loss in total mechanical energy as the particle slides. Here, we will address the ...

This article has been updated to include comments from Raymond Goldstein and Patrick Warren. It is a mathematical puzzle that stumped Galileo, but researchers in France think they have discovered how ...

It may seem like fun and games, but understanding how dominoes topple isn’t child’s play. “It’s a problem that is so natural; everybody plays with dominoes,” says David Cantor, a researcher at ...

Nanomachines will depend on our knowledge of friction, heat transfer and energy dissipation at the atomic level for their very survival. In the scramble to revolutionize the world with nanotechnology ...