It might not seem like scraping the top of a cold stick of butter with a knife could be a scientific test, but engineers say the process is very similar to the "scratch test," which is perhaps the ...

Photo by MSVG/Flickr Gorilla Glass: harder than keys, not as tough as gravity. During a vacation earlier this month, my wife and I put our smartphones in a big, loose beach bag, the kind with bamboo ...

In tribology, nanoscratch testing is used to evaluate the mechanical and tribological properties of materials by employing a nanoscale indenter. At this scale, size-dependent plasticity effects, ...