Technological limitations have made studying friction on the atomic scale difficult, but researchers have now made advances in that quest on two fronts. By speeding up a real atomic force microscope ...

The best part about living in Vermont is that we get to experience all of the seasons. Sometimes cool weather appears out of nowhere and we don’t have the proper attire so we rub our hands together to ...

Tape is one of the most universal tools in today's society. We use it to keep things together, be a guide for painting, and we can use tape for a science experiment to understand friction! In this ...

Friction is hard to predict and control, especially since surfaces that come in contact are rarely perfectly flat. New experiments demonstrate that the amount of friction between two silicon surfaces, ...

Friction plays a key role in how ruptures unzip faults in the Earth’s crust and release waves that cause destructive shaking. Yet dynamic friction evolution is one of the biggest uncertainties in ...