Banana Skins – their promise as an industrial lubricant additive

The work of Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, who were awarded the 2014 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor, continues […]

A rare Ph.D. thesis with a trilobite and tribology

This is one of the very few doctoral these that explicitly deal with both a trilobite (the extinct animal) and tribology (the study of how surfaces rub against each other or don’t): “The classification of textured surfaces under varying illuminant direction,” Ged McGunnigle, PhD dissertation, Heriot-Watt University, June 1998. The author writes: “This thesis sets texture analysis […]