“This project started with a simple question: why do basketball shoes squeak?” Adel Djellouli, a study co-author and materials scientist at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), ...

Basketball shoes on a gym floor, bicycle brakes in need of a tune-up, or the squeal of tires are everyday examples of squeaking sounds. Such sounds have long been attributed to stick-slip friction, or ...

The friction between a silicon ball and silicon wafer was measured in the experimental set-up shown on the left. The new research demonstrates that there is a direct relation between two effects: the ...

I learned to respect friction, as a phenomenon with many nuances, when I was a graduate student. One day, while teaching a problem session in elementary mechanics, I unwisely invented a new problem to ...

(Nanowerk News) An interdisciplinary research team of the Institutes of Physical Chemistry and Physics of the University of Freiburg and the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt-am-Main has ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Even famous thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci were fascinated by the physics of friction. What researchers do know is that the ...