Friction usually announces itself through contact. A chair scraping across a floor, a tire gripping asphalt, a hand sliding ...

How can a horde of active robots be automatically brought to a standstill? By arresting their dynamics in a self-sustained way. This phenomenon was discovered by physicists at Heinrich Heine ...

When tectonic plates move, they rarely do so smoothly. Sometimes they slide almost imperceptibly; at other times, stress is ...

This schematic shows the lattice structure of magnetene, with the dark red spheres depicting iron and the lighter red ones depicting oxygen. Credit: Shwetank Yadav / University of Toronto Engineering ...

Earthquake researchers believed for decades that rock friction within fault lines follows a simple relationship with temperature. However, a new study published by the Proceedings of the National ...

Moving parts in mechanical come into regular contact, leading to wear and tear. Now, researchers have developed a contact control system, driven by artificial intelligence, to greatly reduce contact ...

Researchers found friction can occur without contact, driven by magnetic dynamics, and does not always increase with load. The effect could enable controllable, wear-free technologies.

(Nanowerk News) A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and Rice University have reported the first measurements of the ultra-low-friction behaviour of a material known as ...