“This project started with a simple question: why do basketball shoes squeak?” Adel Djellouli, a study co-author and materials scientist at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), ...

Without the force called friction, cars would skid off the roadway, humans couldn't stride down the sidewalk, and objects would tumble off your kitchen counter and onto the floor. Even so, how ...

Basketball shoes on a gym floor, bicycle brakes in need of a tune-up, or the squeal of tires are everyday examples of squeaking sounds. Such sounds have long been attributed to stick-slip friction, or ...

Taking inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of friction, the ‘sneaker squeak’ question cuts to a deep problem in physics.

Curling is a thrilling sport filled with strategy, skill, sweeping, surprise and science! Curling is a mesmerizing sport filled with strategy, skill, surprise, a lot of yelling, and science—yes ...

Memory fault: friction study could provide new insights into why earthquakes happen. (Courtesy: iStock/allanswort) Experiments by Sam Dillavou and Shmuel Rubinstein at Harvard University have, for the ...

Here’s the rub with friction — scientists don’t really know how it works. Although humans have been harnessing its power since rubbing two sticks together to build the first fire, the physics of ...

Because of friction, sleds don't technically touch the snow and instead ride on a small layer of water created by the heat of the sled sliding down the hill. Sledding is one of many ways Wisconsinites ...

Dumping literal tons of hot volcanic material down a lab flume may finally have revealed how searing mixtures of hot gas and rock travel so far from volcanic eruptions. These pyroclastic flows can ...

This article has been updated to include comments from Raymond Goldstein and Patrick Warren. It is a mathematical puzzle that stumped Galileo, but researchers in France think they have discovered how ...