What is a Surface Force Apparatus (SFA)? The Surface Force Apparatus (SFA) is a highly sensitive scientific instrument used to measure the forces between two surfaces at the nanoscale. It allows ...

Until about 10 years ago, the force test and measurement industry had been fairly unimaginative. It had developed a standard way of building analog load cells, torque transducers and other devices, ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Cells exert, sense, and respond to physical forces through an astounding diversity of mechanisms. Here we review recently developed tools to quantify the forces generated by cells. We first review ...