There’s a shocking lack of understanding of the physics underlying this commonplace phenomenon, but researchers are on the ...

The familiar phenomenon has puzzled researchers for centuries, but experiments are finally making sense of its unruly behaviours.

Rub two identical pieces of glass together and something strange happens. One picks up a positive charge. The other goes negative. This much has been known for centuries. What nobody could explain was ...

Static electricity was first observed in 600 B.C., but researchers have struggled to explain how rubbing causes it. In 2019, researchers discovered nanosized surface deformations at play. The same ...

Scientists at Northwestern University may have figured out why walking on carpet in your socks, petting your furry friend, or rubbing a balloon on your hair creates static electricity. In a new study, ...

As humans we often think we have a pretty good handle on the basics of the way the world works, from an intuition about gravity good enough to let us walk around, play baseball, and land spacecraft on ...

Researchers discovered different electrical charges build up on the front and back parts of a sliding object, creating a current of static electricity. This explains why petting fur or shuffling along ...