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 ...

Is friction real? Once, with the quiet certainty of someone who just stayed up all night in the company of equations describing concrete, my college roommate told me that friction was made up. Now, ...

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 ...

“Dragging” ultracold ions across an optical lattice has provided important insights into friction. By tweaking the distance between the ions, Alexei Bylinskii, Dorian Gangloff and Vladan Vuletić of ...

Liquid assets: how to make coins flow like a fluid Friction in one part of a system can be reduced by boosting friction elsewhere. That is the curious and counterintuitive conclusion of Yasinul Karim ...

In a recent stunt, a Ford crew hitched an all-electric F-150 pickup truck to a freight train filled with 42 more F-150s. Then a driver hit the throttle, and the pickup truck towed the 1.3 ...

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 ...

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 ...

As I was sitting in my physics lecture, fighting a losing battle against my attention span, the professor said something that caught my attention, “When you solve these problems, start by taking ...