Static electricity may seem simple. Students often learn that rubbing a balloon against their hair will cause negatively charged electrons to jump from the strands to the rubber. Because the different ...

Static electricity is so commonplace that it can come across as simple. Other teams are investigating how surface area and velocity during impact might govern charge transfer, and how the breaking ...

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 ...

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 ...