Probably everyone is familiar with the phenomenon: water drops cling to a pane of glass, if it is tilted out of the horizontal plane. Only when a certain angle is reached they slide off. This raises ...

1.1 What is friction? Take this everyday example: when a coffee mug rests on a flat table, the kinetic frictional force is zero. There is no force trying to move the mug across the table, so there is ...

As a simple theoretical model of a cell adhering to a biological interface, we consider a rigid cylinder moving in a viscous shear flow near a wall. Adhesion forces arise through intermolecular bonds ...

Researchers have demonstrated how to entirely suppress static friction between two surfaces. This means that even a minuscule force suffices to set objects in motion. Especially in micromechanical ...

Now I get to do something with that force scale I built. I had a request some time ago to talk about friction. Friction is surprisingly complicated. When two surfaces rub against each other, why is ...

A new model of the slipperiness of ice suggests that a layer of disordered ice forms underneath a sliding object. The model was developed by Bo Persson of Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, and it ...

Have you ever watched a mile-long freight train rumble by and wondered how one locomotive can pull more than a hundred fully loaded cars? The locomotive weighs maybe 150 metric tons, and each car is ...