You may think you know static electricity, but its true nature has long eluded scientists. We’ve now made a huge leap towards ...

We have known about the phenomenon of static electricity since at least the time of Aristotle. Aristotle credits fellow philosopher Thales of Miletus, who lived between 640 and 546 BCE, with the ...

Anyone who has ever pet a cat or shuffled their feet across the carpet knows that rubbing objects together generates static ...

Around 600 BC, the ancient Greek philosopher . Thales discovered that amber attracted dust and other particles when rubbed with a cloth. This is said to be the first report of static electricity ...

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 ...

Static electricity—specifically the triboelectric effect, aka contact electrification—is ubiquitous in our daily lives, found in such things as a balloon rubbed against one's hair or styrofoam ...

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 ...