Create a Physics World account to get access to all available digital issues of the monthly magazine. Your Physics World ...

At a busy street crossing, people wait for the signal to change. When one person steps out first, others soon follow. Scientists in Amsterdam have found that this same kind of behavior happens at a ...

A suspended apparatus used to minimize friction during the experiment. The heavier brass cylinder and lighter ping-pong ball collide repeatedly against the transparent wall, reproducing 31 collisions ...

Friction is an intrinsic physical phenomenon to curling. Without it, objects in motion would move endlessly, without slowing down. This would cause many safety-related problems: Cars or trains could ...

Whenever you get around to doing dishes, how easily water slides down a dirty plate depends on how uneven and crusty the plate’s surface is. At the nanoscale, however, where surface features can be ...

Physics works differently to how you think it does. Our researchers and writers have turned their minds inside out compiling this list, so hang onto your perceptions, we’re going in. Grab your copy of ...

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 ...

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 ...

An interdisciplinary research team of the Institutes of Physical Chemistry and Physics of the University of Freiburg and the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt-am-Main has discovered a ...