A research team in Bochum, Germany has unexpectedly found that light can slow down movements in the nanoworld. This is due to ...

The familiar heat, wear and general grinding to a halt of friction are all caused by what's going on at the microscopic level when two things rub. And down there, even the smoothest surfaces usually ...

The machine doesn’t care what it’s making—only that it’s making it fast. Frictionless systems optimize output. But meaning, memory, and margin live in the mess it leaves behind. The great smoothing is ...

I'll be honest—friction is pretty complicated. Imagine that I have a block of wood sliding on a table. In some way, the atoms on the surface of the wood block are interacting with the surface atoms on ...

It's perhaps the second week of your introductory physics course. Your instructor starts talking about friction and writes the following two formulas on the board. Then there is probably some sort of ...

Researchers in China have isolated the effects of electronic friction, showing for the first time how the subtle drag force it imparts at sliding interfaces can be controlled. They demonstrate that it ...