Static electricity often just seems like an everyday annoyance when a wool sweater crackles as you pull it off, or when a doorknob delivers an unexpected zap. Regardless, the phenomenon is much more ...

There's a reason you may notice it more in the winter. Excess static electricity is always a shock to the system—literally—but if you're experiencing shocks more so than not, annoying is an ...

Sebastian Deffner is affiliated with the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). Static electricity is a ubiquitous part of everyday life. It’s all around us, ...

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 ...