At a busy street crossing, people wait for the signal to change. When one person steps out first, others soon follow.

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 ...

Although robotic devices are used in everything from assembly lines to medicine, engineers have a hard time accounting for the friction that occurs when those robots grip objects - particularly in wet ...

Researchers in Germany have discovered that slipping on ice is caused by dipole interactions, not friction or temperature.

Because of friction, sleds don't technically touch the snow and instead ride on a small layer of water created by the heat of the sled sliding down the hill. Sledding is one of many ways Wisconsinites ...

For over a hundred years, schoolchildren around the world have learned that ice melts when pressure and friction are applied.

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 ...

This is a cooler physics problem than I initially realized. It goes something like this. A block has a mass of 1 kg and is placed on a vertical wall such that the coefficient of static friction is 0.5 ...

For nearly two centuries, scientists believed that ice becomes slippery because pressure or friction melts its surface. New research from Saarland University overturns this idea. For more than a ...

Everybody loves a good, strong disagreement between two academics at the top of their game, especially when their positions are polar opposites. Two recent papers, by John Pendry of Imperial College, ...

For centuries, people believed ice was slippery because pressure and friction melted a thin film of water. But new research ...

MIT scientists have coaxed atoms into an exotic “edge state” for the first time, allowing them to flow completely friction-free. The breakthrough could lead to better superconductor materials. As ...