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 history. The number of times an object had previously touched another determined whether the object became negatively or positively charged when touched again, researchers report in the Feb. 20 Nature.
The work could be a step toward understanding the effects behind the phenomenon of static electricity, in which electric charge accumulates on materials after they are rubbed or touched together. Although static electricity is a daily phenomenon, scientists still don’t understand how the
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