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 ...

One key to harvesting the ocean’s clean energy—at least a little of it—may lie in static electricity. A team of researchers in Portugal has now successfully used it to run small generators inside a ...

Wave power may be about to get a boost from tiny generators that rely on a phenomenon called the triboelectric effect. A team in China has unveiled a design that doubles the previous record for this ...

Okay, not actually a cyclotron… but this ball cyclotron is a good model for what a cyclotron does and the concepts behind it feel kooky and magical. A pair of Ping Pong balls scream around a glass ...

A century after Nikola Tesla sketched a turbine with no blades, researchers are now using that same counterintuitive design to pull useful power out of static electricity. The latest experiments pair ...