1.1 What is friction? Take this everyday example: when a coffee mug rests on a flat table, the kinetic frictional force is zero. There is no force trying to move the mug across the table, so there is ...

Now I get to do something with that force scale I built. I had a request some time ago to talk about friction. Friction is surprisingly complicated. When two surfaces rub against each other, why is ...

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 ...

At a busy street crossing, people wait for the signal to change. When one person steps out first, others soon follow. Scientists in Amsterdam have found that this same kind of behavior happens at a ...

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.

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 ...

Moiré pattern evolution. Courtesy: Andrea Silva and Xin Cao. If you’ve ever struggled to shift a heavy piece of furniture, you have probably noticed that rotating the furniture while pushing it makes ...

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 ...