In a rare move, Amazon.com is increasing friction in one aspect of its customer experience. The company will add a small fee for some returns at UPS stores. This hardly represents a tectonic shift at ...

If you want to know how to make a sneaker with better traction in the rain, just ask a snake. That’s the theory driving the research of Hisham Abdel-Aal, PhD, an associate teaching professor from ...

A research team led by CU Boulder has designed a new kind of synthetic “skin” as slippery as the scales of a snake. The research, published recently in the American Chemical Society journal Applied ...

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 ...

For 15 years, scientists have been baffled by the mysterious way water flows through the tiny passages of carbon nanotubes—pipes with walls that can be just one atom thick. The streams have confounded ...

Nanomachines will depend on our knowledge of friction, heat transfer and energy dissipation at the atomic level for their very survival. In the scramble to revolutionize the world with nanotechnology ...