FRANKFURT. In Germany, there are millions of small firing systems: wood-burning stoves for domestic use in which logs are burned. In the process, a lot of particulate and gaseous pollutants are ...

Watch as tiny pieces of foil magically dance and float inside a bottle! This fascinating experiment demonstrates the invisible force of static electricity and shows how electrical charges can move ...

Benjamin Franklin experimented with electricity on fowl. Portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis, courtesy of The Library of Congress In 1751 Benjamin Franklin planned an electrical ...

Static electricity can be a small annoyance for humans—a zap when you touch a doorknob, your hair shooting up when you pull off a sweater—but for small organisms, it can be a lifesaver. Static helps ...

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 ...

A century after Nikola Tesla sketched a turbine with no blades, researchers are now using that same counterintuitive design ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter ...

If you rub two identical balloons together, they both pick up a static charge. This behavior is strange and unexpected, but it’s been documented in the scientific literature. When our host George ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...