Chemists and physicists at the University of Amsterdam shed light on a crucial aspect of friction: how things begin to slide. Using fluorescence microscopy and dedicated fluorescent molecules, they ...

Nanomachines will depend on our knowledge of friction, heat transfer and energy dissipation at the atomic level for their very survival. In the scramble to revolutionize the world with nanotechnology ...

Nanoscale knowledge of the relationships between water, friction and mineral chemistry could lead to a better understanding of earthquake dynamics, researchers said in a new study. Engineers used ...

Friction is so common in our daily lives that we barely think about it. Humans have been forced to deal with it since prehistoric times: the wheel is essentially a device for reducing friction when ...

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 ...

Friction has been an ever-lasting research problem, ever since the fundamental experimental observations of Leonardo Da Vinci, through the empirical laws postulated by Amontons and Couloumb and until ...

Here’s the rub with friction — scientists don’t really know how it works. Although humans have been harnessing its power since rubbing two sticks together to build the first fire, the physics of ...