Everybody knows how a yo-yo works. It's two disks mounted on an axle attached to a piece of string, and it goes up and down if you throw it right. But what about when the two disks and the axle aren't ...

Now I get to do something with that force scale I built. I had a request some time ago to talk about friction. Friction is surprisingly complicated. When two surfaces rub against each other, why is ...

Earlier, we saw that the work done by friction on a particle sliding on a rough surface is negative, causing a loss in total mechanical energy as the particle slides. Here, we will address the ...

(Nanowerk News) If you even bother to think about friction at all, you might think about rubbing your hands together to warm them up. But friction is a big problem out in the world. Parts that rub ...

Wear has major impacts on everything from the bearing of a wind power plant to an artificial hip joint. However, the exact cause of wear is still unclear. Scientists now show that the effect occurs at ...

An international team has discovered a simple and environmentally friendly way to power the next generation of self-charging electronics. The work is published in Nano Energy. Subscribe to our ...

The upper figure shows the viscoelastic toy model proposed here, characterized by only six independent parameters. Surprisingly, this simple mechanical model produces complicated system dynamics, as ...

Everybody knows how a yo-yo works. It's two disks mounted on an axle attached to a piece of string, and it goes up and down if you throw it right. But what about when the two disks and the axle aren't ...