On The Nature Of Electricity: Recreating The Early Experiments

Bits of material levitating against gravity, a stream of water deflected by invisible means, sparks of light appearing out of thin air; with observations like those, it’s a wonder that the ea…

Is That A Triboelectric Generator In Your Shoe?

The triboelectric effect is familiar to anyone who has rubbed wool on a PVC pipe, or a balloon on a childs’ hair and then stuck it on the wall. Rubbing transfers some electrons from one mater…

3D Printing Your Own Triboelectric Generators

A triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) certainly sounds like the sort of thing you’d need to graduate from Starfleet Engineering to put together, but it actually operates on the same principle …

Harvesting Mechanical Energy From Falling Rain

Collecting energy from various small mechanical processes has always been something that’s been technically possible, but never done on a large scale due to issues with cost and scalability. …

Improving Ocean Power With Static Electricity

Water is heavy, so if you think about it, a moving ocean wave has quite a bit of energy. Scientists have a new way to use triboelectric generators to harvest that power for oceangoing systems. (PDF…

Miracle Of Science: Scotch Tape Improves Generator

We were always amused that one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the recent past — graphene — was started with pencil lead and Scotch tape. Now, researchers at the University of …