Who has never felt that unpleasant little shock when shaking a metal handle, taking off a wool sweater, or brushing against someone in the dark? These tiny sparks are due to static electricity, ...

Rub a balloon on your hair and the balloon typically picks up a negative electric charge, while your hair goes positive. But a new study shows that the charge an object picks up can depend on its ...

A parasitic worm uses static electricity to launch itself onto flying insects, a mechanism uncovered by physicists and ...

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 ...