Quick, out behind the bike shed, Professors Pendry and Leonhardt are having a fight over a completely hypothetical situation. If we hurry, we should catch the end of round three. Science: it is ...

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 mechanics of friction may seem the stuff of high-school physics, but only now are some aspects of the problem being understood. A spinning coin is the subject of a new exploration of frictional ...