A research team in Bochum, Germany has unexpectedly found that light can slow down movements in the nanoworld. This is due to quantum friction, a phenomenon that has been poorly understood until now.

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 ...

‘Friction-maxxing’ for brain health: Could it improve your outlook on life? - ‘When life is too frictionless, your brain goes ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...