Researchers have uncovered friction without contact—driven entirely by magnetic interactions. As two magnetic layers slide, ...

Sometimes you think you have a complete understanding of something and then BOOM—a simple problem throws everything out the window. Let's consider a very basic physics problem involving pushing a ...

Researchers at the University of Konstanz have uncovered a new mechanism of sliding friction: resistance to motion that ...

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 ...

Really, this is the experiment I wanted to start on. How does friction work in Bad Piggies? Let me start with a quick summary of my experiments so far. Scale. For the size of stuff in Bad Piggies, I ...

One of the dirty little secrets of physics is that there is no generally accepted explanation of the basic laws of friction. An advance in the theory of cracks will stimulate fresh thinking on the ...

Is friction real? Once, with the quiet certainty of someone who just stayed up all night in the company of equations describing concrete, my college roommate told me that friction was made up. Now, ...