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

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: ...

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

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.

When load increases steadily, so does friction, but in the realm of magnetization dynamics, things aren’t so simple.

Although robotic devices are used in everything from assembly lines to medicine, engineers have a hard time accounting for the friction that occurs when those robots grip objects - particularly in wet ...

Heh, maybe the problem is the premise. What real surface made of matter would even come close to this? Strikes me too as a case of theoreticians being wankers. Maybe I'm unimaginative, but I can't see ...