It's perhaps the second week of your introductory physics course. Your instructor starts talking about friction and writes the following two formulas on the board. Then there is probably some sort of ...

Friction is an intrinsic physical phenomenon to curling. Without it, objects in motion would move endlessly, without slowing down. This would cause many safety-related problems: Cars or trains could ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Frictional interfaces abound in natural and man-made systems, yet their dynamics are not well-understood. Recent extensive experimental data have revealed that velocity-strengthening friction, where ...

Humans have been making fire using friction for thousands of years, with evidence of its use found in archaeological records across different cultures worldwide. Fire by friction is a testament to ...

A good old game of carrom has really stood the test of time. Set up a board and people around will flock to it while practising their finger gymnastics. You may not have noticed but the game often ...