Basketball shoes on a gym floor, bicycle brakes in need of a tune-up, or the squeal of tires are everyday examples of squeaking sounds. Such sounds have long been attributed to stick-slip friction, or ...

Harvard engineers think they've found the reason basketball shoes squeak, and it's due to pockets of friction between the rubber and the court.

“This project started with a simple question: why do basketball shoes squeak?” Adel Djellouli, a study co-author and ...

(Nanowerk News) 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 ...

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.