The familiar heat, wear and general grinding to a halt of friction are all caused by what's going on at the microscopic level when two things rub. And down there, even the smoothest surfaces usually ...

Through joint research with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Tokyo, NIMS for the first time experimentally ...

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 ...

The machine doesn’t care what it’s making—only that it’s making it fast. Frictionless systems optimize output. But meaning, memory, and margin live in the mess it leaves behind. The great smoothing is ...

An international team of researchers has reported a new understanding of a little-known process that happens in virtually every cell of our bodies. Protein folding is the process by which not-yet ...

Sometimes you think you have a complete understanding of something and then BOOM—a simple problem throws everything out the window. Let's consider a very basic physics problem involving pushing a ...

Controlling the friction between two moving surfaces — and possibly even reducing it to zero — is one of the outstanding challenges in modern tribology. Two recent discoveries may make this dream come ...