Energy & Green Tech

Nanofluidic device generates power with saltwater

There is a largely untapped energy source along the world's coastlines: the difference in salinity between seawater and freshwater. A new nanodevice can harness this difference to generate power.

Engineering

Scientists devise Kibble dynamic force reference

Static force, such as the weight of a person standing motionless on a bathroom scale or the force that an office full of equipment exerts on a high-rise floor, can be easily determined using scales, balances, load cells, ...

Internet

Google launches ChatGPT rival Bard in EU, Brazil

Google launched its AI chatbot Bard in the European Union and several more nations on Thursday, entering a key market in its race against Microsoft-backed ChatGPT after a delay over data privacy concerns.

page 1 from 17

Force

In physics, a force is any influence that causes an object to undergo a change in speed, a change in direction, or a change in shape. In other words, a force is that which can cause an object with mass to change its velocity (which includes to begin moving from a state of rest), i.e., to accelerate, or which can cause a flexible object to deform. Force can also be described by intuitive concepts such as a push or pull. A force has both magnitude and direction, making it a vector quantity. Newton's second law, F=ma, was originally formulated in slightly different, but equivalent terms: the original version states that the net force acting upon an object is equal to the rate at which its momentum changes.

Related concepts to force include: thrust, which increases the velocity of an object; drag, which decreases the velocity of an object; and torque which produces changes in rotational speed of an object. Forces which do not act uniformly on all parts of a body will also cause mechanical stresses, a technical term for influences which cause deformation of matter. While mechanical stress can remain embedded in a solid object, gradually deforming it, mechanical stress in a fluid determines changes in its pressure and volume.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA