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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The upper figure shows the viscoelastic toy model proposed here, characterized by only six independent parameters. Surprisingly, this simple mechanical model produces complicated system dynamics, as ...

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 ...

Say we consider a simple experiment of balancing a wooden rod on two fingers. The finger on the left, (1), will remain stationary, whereas the finger on the right, (2), will be moved toward the left.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. In earthquakes, the principle shows how one part of a fault slipping can unleash movement across miles of crust. (CREDIT: ...