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.

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 ...

Really, this is the experiment I wanted to start on. How does friction work in Bad Piggies? Let me start with a quick summary of my experiments so far. Scale. For the size of stuff in Bad Piggies, I ...

A new analysis of the 2018 collapse of Kilauea volcano's caldera helps to confirm the reigning scientific paradigm for how friction works on earthquake faults. The model quantifies the conditions ...

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 ...

Irregularities present on a surface are often described as surface roughness or texture. These surface textures such as grooves and dimples impart friction, which is the force between two sliding ...

Keywords: XY-friction pendulum (XY-FP) bearings. Seismic isolation. Truss-bridge models. Numerical analyses. Harmonic simulations. Earthquake simulations. Flat sliding (FS) bearings. Seismic ...

On April 30, 2018, on the eastern flank of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano, lava suddenly drained from a crater that had been spewing lava for more than three decades. Then the floor of the crater, named ...

Whenever you get around to doing dishes, how easily water slides down a dirty plate depends on how uneven and crusty the plate’s surface is. At the nanoscale, however, where surface features can be ...

A famous demonstration of the counterintuitive power of friction involves two telephone directories with their pages alternately interleaved. People are then invited to pull the directories apart, a ...