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.

A new analysis of the 2018 collapse of Kilauea volcano's caldera helps to confirm the reigning scientific paradigm for how friction works on earthquake faults. The model quantifies the conditions ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Show that static friction is greater than kinetic friction by pulling on a wooden box using a spring scale. Clamp the board to a table. (Optional) Select the 50 N scale on the force probe and connect ...

Researchers have demonstrated how to entirely suppress static friction between two surfaces. This means that even a minuscule force suffices to set objects in motion. Especially in micromechanical ...

To study fine touch, selecting samples based on how many mechanical instabilities they can form is more predictive than using the friction coefficient, which has been the default choice.

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 ...