What’s the News: In high school physics classes, students are often taught that static electricity develops when electrons detach from the surface of one object and jump to another, causing a difference in charge. Since opposite charges attract, the two objects are drawn to one another (like your hair to a balloon). But new research published in the journal Science shows that static electricity is caused by more than just the exchange of individual electrons, and instead involves the transfer of bigger (yet still tiny) clumps of material.

How the Heck:

Scientists conventionally believed that static electricity required friction between two different non-metals, which would tug at their electrons with different amounts of force. But last year, a group of researchers at Northwestern University found that two sheets of the same polymer, like Teflon, can generate static electricity, also called contact electrification (pdf). After the discovery, some of the researchers, including chemist Bartosz Grzybowski, wanted to understand how it all worked.
Grzybowski ...