MINNEAPOLIS — When someone touches something and gets shocked, it's awkward and a bit painful. What causes static electricity? And what actually happens when you get shocked? Visitors of the ...

Static electricity is everywhere, especially in your house. “Everyone has experienced that unexpected shock when folding laundry or touching a metal object in their home,” says John Bell, an ...

Static electricity is the buildup of an electrical charge on the surface of an object. Lightning is the most dramatic and potentially lethal example of static discharge. A far more benign illustration ...

The first documentation of static electricity dates back to 600 BCE. Even after 2,600 years’ worth of tiny shocks, however, researchers couldn’t fully explain how rubbing two objects together causes ...

We've all tussled with a skirt that wouldn't stop wrapping around our backside and legs (revealing every bump and bulge!) or a shirt that delivers the shock of one's life or even that hat that makes ...

Rubbing two balloons together leads George to a shocking discovery. If you rub two identical balloons together, they both pick up a static charge. This strange and unexpected behavior has been ...

Engineers are well informed about the need for appropriate HVAC systems in rooms that contain IT servers for mission critical facilities. The consequences of interruption of information transfer in ...

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 ...

The paper, recently published in the journal PNAS, found that roundworms can use static electricity to leap up to 25 times ...

The parasitic roundworm Steinernema carpocapsae, which live in soil, are already known to leap some 25 times their body ...

Jan. 9 is National Static Electricity Day. All things in the universe are made up of atoms. These atoms have a positive charge in their center, or nucleus, and negative charged particles, called ...