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 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 ...

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, ...

Northwestern University scientists have made a new contribution to understanding a long-standing phenomenon called static electricity. In their most recent research, the researchers found that such ...

For centuries, static electricity has been the subject of intrigue and scientific investigation. Now, researchers from the Waitukaitis group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) ...

Dry air from Arctic front creates perfect conditions for unexpected zaps.

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 ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. At first glance, it’s a wonder that parasitic nematodes exist at all. To reproduce, these minuscule creatures—roughly the size of ...

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 ...