Some scribbles dismissed in the 1920s by the then-director of the Victoria & Albert Museum as "irrelevant notes and diagrams in red chalk" were recently revealed to represent Leonardo da Vinci's first ...

Researchers have uncovered friction without contact—driven entirely by magnetic interactions. As two magnetic layers slide, ...

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.

Create a Physics World account to get access to all available digital issues of the monthly magazine. Your Physics World ...

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 ...

The relationship between friction and load, quantified three centuries ago, has an exception when the interaction causes magnetic realignment. The discovery won’t let you off the hook when dragging ...

Delving into history books, we can learn that already thousands of years ago the Egyptians realized that lubricants like water and oil helped reduce the friction of sledges that moved the heavy stones ...

I'll be honest—friction is pretty complicated. Imagine that I have a block of wood sliding on a table. In some way, the atoms on the surface of the wood block are interacting with the surface atoms on ...