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Success in President Trump’s war on Iran now appears partly to depend on whether Washington can reopen the Strait of Hormuz, stave off global economic decline, and avoid another endless war.

Turkish history offers both a warning and a way forward about how to deal with this vital waterway, which Iran has effectively closed, sharply reducing the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Specifically, the lessons concern the Dardanelles, the narrow strait linking the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara and, beyond it, the Bosporus and the Black Sea.

The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the world’s most important energy choke points, carrying oil equivalent to one-fifth of global consumption and roughly one-fifth of the global liquefied natural gas trade. That is precisely why the temptation to address the problem militarily is so dangerous.

On paper, choke points can create a false sense of simplicity, especially for a superpower that enjoys a vast technological and military edge over its adversary. To war planners in Washington, a narrow passage can look like a technical problem to be overcome by force. In reality, strategic waterways are never merely geographic bottlenecks; they are tests of sovereignty and the balance of power.

That is what the British and French discovered during World War I when they tried to force passage through the Dardanelles, then controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The Gallipoli campaign, as it was named for the peninsula that runs along the strait, of 1915-16 was Winston Churchill’s brainchild as first lord of the Admiralty. The Ottomans had entered the war on Germany’s side and seemed weak. Britain’s idea was to free up passage in the strait, knock the Ottomans out of the war, and reopen supply routes to Russia. Instead, the campaign became one of the war’s bloodiest disasters for the Allies, killing more than 130,000 men — roughly 44,000 Allied troops and at least 86,000 Ottoman soldiers — and costing Churchill his post.

In Turkish memory, Gallipoli is a story of national birth. Mustafa Kemal, the Ottoman officer who would later become Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, made his name in the defense of the straits. “Canakkale cannot be passed,” a reference to a city on the strait, remains a potent slogan.

The British defeat also left the Ottomans blocking Russia’s only viable warm-water exit to the Mediterranean for grain exports and military aid, deepening the economic and military crisis that fueled revolutionary unrest at home, hastening the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, and the Bolshevik seizure of power.

A U.S. effort to open the Strait of Hormuz by force would be risky, military experts warn. Iran can exploit the advantages of asymmetric warfare, mining the passage and using drones, missiles, and small-boat swarm attacks to make fighting for a narrow waterway costly even for a superior navy.

But for President Trump, the choice does not need to be between a military gamble and acquiescing to Iranian control over the strait — and, by extension, over global energy markets. The United States can borrow a page from Turkish history and push for a negotiated maritime agreement, taking inspiration from the 1936 Montreux Convention. The document is foundational for modern Turkey and ensures that this critical waterway stays open while acknowledging the sovereignty and security concerns of the state that overlooks it.

For much of the 19th and early 20th century, control of the straits stood at the center of Russia’s imperial ambitions and European great-power rivalry. After World War I, the new Turkish republic accepted a regime of free passage and demilitarization under international supervision. But by the mid-1930s, Europe was rearming, collective security was eroding and Turkey feared growing pressure from both the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy. Ankara pushed for a new convention that would guarantee safe passage without sacrificing the republic’s own survival.

Thus came the Montreux Convention, which was signed by 10 nations, including France, Britain, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and several other Black Sea nations. Montreux preserved freedom of passage for merchant shipping in peacetime while restoring Turkey’s sovereignty over the straits. It also gave Turkey greater discretion in time of war to impose restriction on warships — which Ankara invoked early in the war in Ukraine to restrict the Russian fleet’s access to the Black Sea. In other words, Montreux was a rules-based compromise between openness and sovereignty: It kept commerce moving while recognizing that the state controlling the waterway could not be expected to ignore its own security.

This model offers a useful lesson and perhaps an off-ramp in talks with Iran, even though Montreux is not a copy-and-paste model for Hormuz. Turkey in 1936 was revising an existing international regime in peacetime; Hormuz sits inside an active war.

The geography is also more complicated. The Dardanelles are controlled by one state, Turkey. Hormuz lies between Iran and Oman, with the main shipping lanes largely in Omani waters. Any Hormuz version of Montreux would have to be very specific: no attacks on merchant shipping, no mining of transit lanes, rules to avoid conflict between naval forces, provisions during wartime to allow for restrictions on warships from non-Gulf states. There should also be some outside mechanism — through Oman, the United Nations, or a small contact group of Arab Gulf nations — to monitor compliance.

Washington should test Iran’s appetite for tying a cease-fire to a multilateral framework that guarantees freedom of passage. At its core, a Hormuz convention would need to do what Montreux did: give Iran something it values in exchange for legally binding, verifiable commitments to permit commercial passage. A durable peace in the Gulf is unlikely to come from pretending Iran has no residual capacity to threaten the strait. Nor can the international community accept a situation in which Tehran turns a global artery into a weapon. A deal would have to recognize the security concerns of Iran and the other Gulf states, such as Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and be tied to a broader cease-fire.

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Chantal Jahchan

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The Australian biotech company Cortical Labs recently posted a video in which 200,000 living human neurons grown on a silicon chip played the 1993 first-person shooter Doom. The neuron-controlled main character wandered corridors, encountered enemies, and fired weapons—clumsily, and it died often. But the neurons were playing nonetheless.

The demo could mark a genuine inflection point. The neurons appeared to exhibit what Cortical Labs’s chief scientific officer, Brett Kagan, calls “adaptive, real-time goal-directed learning.” The stakes extend well beyond gaming, in part because AI’s appetite for electricity has been rapidly growing. Though neurons are unlikely to replace microchips, they can perform some calculations far more efficiently, and studying them could offer new approaches to computing—and, perhaps, to testing neurological drugs.

To be clear, Cortical Labs’s neural cells aren’t extracted from brains. “You can essentially take a small bit of blood or skin,” Kagan explains, “isolate certain types of cells, turn them into stem cells and then, from those stem cells, generate an indefinite supply of neural cells.” Each of its computing units can house about 800,000 neurons in a self-contained life-support system that can keep them alive for up to six months. The interface relies on electricity—“the shared language between biology and silicon,” as he puts it. When brain cells are active, they generate small electrical pulses, and the system can deliver small pulses back to them.

But wiring is the easy part. The hard part is getting cells in a dish to do anything purposeful. “The temptation is to anthropomorphize and say, oh, they like [playing Doom],” Kagan says. “But this isn’t an animal or a human or anything even as complex as an insect. It’s a system. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Does a computer like or dislike the reward function on a [reinforcement-learning] model?’”

The solution to motivating neurons drew on the free energy principle, which was developed by neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. The principle holds that neural systems are driven to predict their environment. “If I reach for an empty can of drink and I successfully predict the outcomes of my actions, that’s sort of a world I can live in,” Kagan says. “But if I reach for it and sometimes it turns into a chicken and sometimes it turns into a firework, that world would be impossible to live in.”

To train the neurons, the team built a simple feedback loop. Wrong moves produced random, unpredictable signals—white noise. Right moves produced structured, predictable ones. “Any signal that the cells could not possibly predict is something that the cells would then just have to learn to avoid,” Kagan says, “because that would be the only way to create predictability in this environment.” In effect, chaos was punishment, and order was reward.

In October 2022, Cortical Labs published a proof-of-concept study in the journal Neuron. Kagan and his colleagues showed that within minutes, neurons on microchips could learn to play Pong, the classic video game in which a player repeatedly intercepts a ball—think two-dimensional ping-pong. But Pong only involves a bouncing square and a moving line. Doom has corridors, enemies, three-dimensional navigation, and a lot of things that are trying to kill you.

To make that leap, Cortical Labs organized a hackathon with Stanford University. Independent researcher Sean Cole paired the neurons with a standard learning algorithm. The hybrid system outperformed the algorithm running on its own, suggesting that the biological cells were contributing to the learning process.

Cortical Labs frames its ambitions around two tracks. The first is medical: “93 to 99 percent of clinical trials, depending on how you cut it, in the neuropsychiatric space fail,” Kagan says. Many of those drugs are tested in neurons in a dish, but he points out that brain cells are not meant to sit in an information void. “We’ve actually published and shown that when you have cells in a game environment or a world environment, they’re fundamentally different in how they respond to drugs, how they exhibit disease,” he says.

The second track is computational. Neurons form “the most powerful information-processing system that we’re aware of,” Kagan says. “The complexity of it far exceeds anything we’ve built with silicon.” Silicon transistors, he says, have first-order complexity—a binary state, 0’s and 1’s. “Biological neurons have at least third-order complexity, probably much higher. They can hold at least three interacting dynamic states at any one time.”

That complexity, researchers argue, could translate into major energy savings. Feng Guo, an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington, sees Cortical Labs’s biocomputing platform as capable of “high-level computing.” In a 2023 paper in Nature Electronics, Guo and his colleagues introduced “Brainoware,” a system that uses three-dimensional brain organoids for computing. For Guo, the energy argument is decisive. The human brain uses just 20 watts—less than a dim lightbulb. “If you want to create a similar computing power for the silicon-based AI computing system, that would be at least a million times higher,” he says.

Still, Kagan is careful not to oversell the future. “A pocket calculator will outperform me at long division any day,” he says. “But your best state-of-the-art [reinforcement-learning] AI algorithm isn’t as good as going into someone else’s house and finding the way to make a cup of tea.” Biological computing is “a new tool in the intelligence toolbox,” he says.

Don’t expect a personal computer run on a brain in a vat anytime soon. Kagan speaks realistically about the research still to be done, but says that “you move from science fiction to science once you can work on the problem.” A few years ago, biological computing had one published game of Pong to its name. Now it has a commercial platform, an application programming interface that developers can connect to, and a video of neurons stumbling through Doom—badly, but they’re learning.

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The classic video game Doom at OXO Video Game Museum in Madrid, Spain. Eduardo Parra/Europa Press via Getty Images

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Then the pandemic happened. In the years since, women have slowly regained their foothold in the labor force, although working mothers in particular have faced an uphill battle between strict in-office policies and ballooning childcare costs. As of February, however, women have overtaken men in the workforce yet again. A report from Indeed’s Hiring Lab last week highlighted that the gap has closed, driven in large part by job growth in sectors that are dominated by women. 

Between February 2024 and February 2026, the U.S. economy added 1.2 million jobs. A significant portion of this growth—over 814,000 jobs—was on account of women, and across sectors like healthcare that tend to draw more female workers. Even in a sluggish job market, healthcare is one of the few industries that has continued adding jobs and helped keep the economy afloat.

In fact, over the last year, significant job growth in healthcare has offset losses across the rest of the workforce: The U.S. economy added a total of 156,000 jobs overall, due to 375,000 new healthcare jobs. This pattern is even clearer over the past year: The share of jobs held by women has increased by nearly 300,000 since February 2025, while men saw an overall drop in employment of 142,000 jobs.

It seems this uptick in women’s labor force participation reflects a broader shift that was already underway, before it was derailed by the pandemic. But as Indeed notes, the gender gap isn’t closing because record numbers of women are entering the workforce. The real driver of this change is a notable decline in men’s labor force participation, as employment has dropped in sectors that have historically been dominated by men, such as manufacturing and construction.

It’s also clear, from recent data, that women’s employment is not exactly secure: In the first half of 2025, about 212,000 women left the workforce. There was also a noticeable dip in employment for certain women, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, which found that the number of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 dropped by nearly three percentage points between January and June of last year. 

With the rapid adoption of generative AI, new forces threaten to undermine labor force participation for all workers, just as men are facing other headwinds in the job market. And while there may be new opportunities available to women in the workforce, the very issues that have long limited their career growth—from pay inequities to caregiving responsibilities—still loom large, even as the economy continues to rely on their labor.

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[Photo: Oostendorp/peopleimages.com/Adobe Stock]

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As many Americans prepared to start the workweek, President Trump announced his intentions to destroy Iran’s electricity-generating stations and water-purifying plants should the regime fail to lift its blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

“If for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched,’” Mr. Trump wrote on social media early Monday morning.

The president’s ultimatum is a contemptible departure from the restraint that most wartime presidents have strived for. The bombing campaign Mr. Trump described holds the potential to affect millions of Iranian civilians, inflicting long-term consequences on their access to water, electricity, and other necessities. Such an attack order should never be given — in public or private.

His proposal, if acted upon, would almost certainly amount to a war crime. One of the central tenets of the laws that govern modern conflict is that the targeting of civilians is off-limits in military campaigns. Customary law of war principles would prohibit infrastructure providing essential services to civilians from targeted obliteration.

Should the U.S. military act on an order from Mr. Trump to indiscriminately destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, it will be a flagrant violation of the laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian law, said Robert Goldman, a law professor and the faculty director of the War Crimes Research Office at American University. “It’s wanton destruction that would bring about clear and foreseeable catastrophic effects on the civilian population,” Mr. Goldman said.

A military can justify its attacks on infrastructure when the facilities have a so-called dual use for both civilians and an adversary’s military. For instance, a bridge clearly benefits people in their daily commutes, but it can also be a vital artery to move troops and supplies in a war zone. A bridge can be legally destroyed under international law if it meets certain criteria in the way it’s being used by armed forces during active hostilities. But militaries can’t blow up every bridge inside the country they’re attacking.

Because the U.S. military now has near-total control over Iranian airspace, there doesn’t appear to be a pressing need to wipe out every electrical station that might power the country’s remaining operating air defense radars, sensors, or other equipment. Similarly, a desalination plant may provide water to Iranian bases and forces, but bombarding all desalination plants would most likely be disproportionate to the effect it could have on the 90 million people living in the country.

“Whether a power plant would constitute a military objective or civilian object would depend on the facts and circumstances, but the president’s categorical statement represents a threat to target even civilian objects regardless of the requirement for distinction, which would be a war crime,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in the laws of war. He said the same would be true of oil wells and desalination plants, according to international humanitarian law that dictates avoiding civilian harm.

These acts would also be antithetical to how the American military sees itself — maintaining a moral standing that dates back to the Revolutionary War. The foreword of the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual says, “The law of war is a part of our military heritage, and obeying it is the right thing to do.” It continues, “But we also know that the law of war poses no obstacle to fighting well and prevailing.”

Gen. Joseph Votel, who was commander of U.S. Central Command during Mr. Trump’s first term, said that adhering to the legal standards aligns with our national values. “It gives us credibility with our partners, with our own service members and citizens, and with civilians in those areas we must operate,” he said. And while the United States’ treatment of enemy combatants and of civilians during war is also far from perfect, American forces often do go to great lengths to mitigate civilian casualties. An average airstrike has countless hours of analyzed intelligence behind it and a lawyer’s involvement. Mistakes still happen, such as the horrific Feb. 28 strike on an elementary school in Minab, which killed at least 175 people. The incident remains under investigation, and American military targeters may have believed the school was part of an adjacent naval base in southern Iran.

Mr. Trump’s threats to indiscriminately launch airstrikes on Iran’s infrastructure amount to holding a civilian population hostage as a means of coercing the government in Tehran.

Praising gratuitous death and destruction has been a running theme in Mr. Trump’s second term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly dismissed the “stupid rules of engagement,” which are drawn up by senior officers and U.S. military lawyers to protect both troops and civilians, and instead has called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

This glorification of carnage has been echoed in the White House’s social media channels, which in recent weeks have published a series of stomach-churning propaganda clips that feature real footage of airstrikes in Iran cut with cartoons and scenes from video games and movies — all edited to guitar lick-laden soundtracks. War may appear super cool to Trump administration staffers who watch it from 6,000 miles away through a pop-culture viewfinder, but the rest of us should examine the human reality — and cost — of combat.

In Iran, no fewer than 1,443 civilians, at least 217 of them children, have been killed since Mr. Trump launched the war alongside Israel on Feb. 28, a consortium of human rights groups estimated in a recent report. The United Nations reports up to 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced from their homes. Across the region, 13 American military service members have been killed, and more than 300 U.S. troops have been injured. More than 1,110 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, more than 50 people have been killed in Persian Gulf countries, and at least 16 people have died in Iran’s attacks on Israel.

If the U.S. military follows through with the president’s proposed attacks, it will surely open an even bloodier new chapter as the war continues in its fifth week. It would be a major escalation that risks even greater Iranian retaliation against allies’ energy sites across the Gulf, causing a domino effect of suffering for civilians across the Middle East.

It would also be self-defeating. Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have repeatedly called upon average Iranians to revolt and overthrow the regime. A bombing campaign against the critical utilities these very people depend on to live their lives is hardly an inspiring call to action. More likely, it would propagate a new generation of enemies for Americans to fight.

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Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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Static electricity is so commonplace that it can come across as simple. Rub a balloon against your head, and the transfer of charges will make your hair stand on end. Shuffle your feet on a carpet, and the charge imbalance you produce can shock an innocent passer-by.

So it might come as a surprise that static electricity — which arises from what researchers in the field call the triboelectric effect — has left scientists racking their brains for centuries. Some of the basics are clear. Materials transfer charges when they’re rubbed or otherwise come into contact with each other: one becomes more positively charged and the other more negatively charged. Opposite charges attract, whereas identical charges repel, and ta-da, you have a primary-school science experiment.

But most everything else in this field remains baffling. Is it the electrons, ions, or bits of material that transfer the charge? Why do some materials charge positively and others negatively? What happens when two samples of the same material come into contact? For instance, when “rubbing a balloon on a balloon”, says experimental physicist Scott Waitukaitis at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg. A big part of the problem is that experiments tend to misbehave, with the same procedures producing different results.

Now, researchers are picking apart some of the puzzles that have long plagued the field. With sophisticated laboratory set-ups that carefully control for compounding factors, Waitukaitis and his team have found that the charging of some materials has a strange tendency to hinge on their past interactions. This week in Nature, Waitukaitis and his colleagues report that carbon-carrying surface molecules can have a role in guiding which way charge is exchanged.

These discoveries “are the best work in a really long time” in the field, says Daniel Lacks, a chemical engineer who has studied triboelectricity at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Other teams are investigating how surface area and velocity during impact might govern charge transfer, and how the breaking of chemical bonds contributes.

The influx of research seems to be driven by a desire to scrutinize the fundamental physics at play, says Laurence Marks, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. A better understanding of the science of static electricity could lead to improved devices that use it to power remote sensors or wearable technologies without batteries, for example. It could also help to prevent the electrical discharges that can cause industrial explosions.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that static electricity is far from a simple phenomenon that abides by one clear-cut set of rules, researchers say. Instead, each exchange of charges could be shaped by several factors that vary with the circumstances. Some of these factors are now known, and others are still waiting to be uncovered.

Ancient observations

The history of static electricity dates back to at least the ancient Greek period. Triboelectric includes the Greek words for ‘rubbing’ and ‘amber’, because, after amber is rubbed against fur, it attracts light objects such as feathers. At the end of the sixteenth century, English physicist William Gilbert identified other materials that had the same attractive power, including glass, diamonds and sapphires, and distinguished this type of electrical pull from that of magnetism. In the centuries that followed, scientists learnt that lightning was an electrostatic discharge, a supersized version of the benign zap that comes from shuffling feet across a carpet, and invented early electrostatic generators — forerunners of the Van de Graaff generators that wow students in science museums.

By the mid-eighteenth century, researchers had also begun documenting which materials became negatively charged and which positively, producing lists called triboelectric series. These rank materials from the most likely to charge positively to the most likely to charge negatively, with rabbit fur listed close to the top and silicon near the bottom, for instance.

There was a lull in efforts to understand the phenomenon for part of the twentieth century before interest resurged around the turn of the twenty-first century. Marks attributes this renewed interest at least in part to the invention of the triboelectric nanogenerator. This device relies on the triboelectric effect to convert mechanical energy into electricity. It attracted researchers who were interested in fresh ways to power small technologies. “In the last ten years, the field has literally exploded,” says Giulio Fatti, a mechanical engineer at Imperial College London.

Even with the attention boost, however, the fundamentals of triboelectricity have remained elusive. There are some generally accepted ideas, says Marks. A material has a specific potential for a charged particle to escape that depends on the material’s surface and composition. This potential is called the material’s work function and, so far, it applies best to metallic materials, Waitukaitis says. A sample also needs to be able to trap the charged particles, so they are kept in place when the materials separate after the exchange. But physicists are still pinning down the exact mechanisms behind these phenomena.

Other details of the contact seem to matter, too. But what matters most, under which circumstances, and for what material,s remains unclear. Whether triboelectricity can be explained by existing physics or whether it demands its own model has been an open question, says Marks.

Looking to the past

Waitukaitis and his team were investigating how samples of the same material can exchange a charge when they encountered the inconsistent results that have long frustrated researchers in the field. Triboelectric series are difficult to reproduce. Teams have obtained variable results concerning which materials become more positively or negatively charged, and, even, different findings with the same samples.

Waitukaitis tasked his then-PhD student, Juan Carlos Sobarzo, with attempting to form a series using samples of the same silicone-based polymer. But Sobarzo couldn’t obtain any consistent results. In one experiment, sample A would become negatively charged when interacting with sample B. In the next, it would become positively charged.

“For a very long time, we thought we were doing something wrong,” Waitukaitis says. “We thought there was some variable we weren’t controlling.”

Even when the team carefully controlled for humidity — because researchers thought that water on a material’s surface could affect how it charges — the results remained befuddling.

Then, Sobarzo dug up a set of samples that had already been through many experiments, and tested how they interacted with fresh ones. Quickly, the researchers noticed that the samples that had been through more contact tended to become negatively charged. In further experiments, they kept track of how many contacts each sample had already undergone.

“That’s when things started to make sense. The samples that had more touches in their history were always charging negatively,” Waitukaitis says. “What looked like chaos was an indication of the samples evolving.”

The researchers suspect this evolution has to do with how the sample’s surface deforms with each contact.

In the current paper, Waitukaitis, working with Galien Grosjean, an applied physicist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, and their colleagues, looked deeper into how charge is exchanged between two seemingly identical materials. This time, they worked with oxides — materials, such as sand, that are made up of atoms bonded to oxygen — and used several technologies, including a device that levitates samples to keep their charge from changing. They also used a high-speed camera to measure the samples’ charge precisely.

Before the experiment, the scientists thought that water on the materials’ surface might affect the charge exchange. But samples stored in either a humid or dry environment did not seem to be affected noticeably. Then, the researchers baked the materials and found that the baked samples tended to become charged negatively after contact, and the unbaked ones positively.

After exploring the materials’ interfaces, the researchers realized that the baking process changed the results by getting rid of the carbon-carrying molecules on the materials’ surface. These types of molecule, such as the carbon-rich greenhouse gas methane, are commonly picked up from the air. They “slowly but surely get on every surface,” Grosjean says. The findings suggest that the material is more likely to become positively charged after contact if it has a greater number of carbonaceous molecules on its surface.

Waitukaitis says the team did a double-take after discovering that it was the carbon-carrying molecules at play. “You hardly ever hear people talk about those molecules in the static-electricity field,” he says.

These results provide first steps towards understanding which factors influence charge transfer the most. So far, the contact-history findings seem to pertain only to polymer materials such as plastics, whereas the latest results apply just to oxides.

Still, the work indicates that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to how materials charge. “The idea of a permanent triboelectric ordering among different materials is a mirage,” says Waitukaitis.

That such small factors could be so impactful isn’t necessarily a new idea, says Lacks. “But what is totally new are these really systematic experiments to prove that a particular contaminant is playing a governing, controlling role,” he adds. The field has “moved away from the hand-waving to a more scientific proof.”

Zapping forward

Other groups are doing their own disentangling. Researchers in South Korea, for example, reported that they could control the charge transfer by manipulating a material’s internal electric field. “This was meaningful because triboelectricity had long been considered largely uncontrollable,” says study co-author Sang-Woo Kim, who studies triboelectric energy harvesting at Yonsei University in Seoul. The findings, Marks says, fit with existing electromagnetic principles, suggesting that triboelectrification doesn’t need a fresh set of rules. And a team in Germany has found that as the impact velocity between two colliding metals increases, so does the impact surface area, which can affect charge transfer. The link between impact velocity and charge transfer had been up for debate.

Fatti and his collaborators have studied triboelectricity and the breaking of chemical bonds, finding that a metal can break the chemical bonds on a polymer’s surface when the two materials interact. This instability creates the right chemical conditions for electrons to be exchanged to re-stabilize the bond. The findings, reported last January, could help researchers to create better-performing triboelectric nanogenerators, they say.

Further research might also help to prevent the electrical discharges that cause damage or ignite explosions — at industrial factories, for instance. Other applications include controlling the charge held in materials through 3D printing to create a temporary electric equivalent of a permanent magnet and assessing the damage that the Moon’s prolific dust could do to future lunar base camps.

Marks says that since he started working in the field in 2018, he’s found that more physicists and chemists are applying “hard-core analysis” to static electricity, performing painstakingly careful measurements.

Waitukaitis agrees that more labs are “getting careful” with experiments. “Then those labs share the techniques that helped them with other labs,” he says. It’s still a small, tight-knit group of scientists with one dedicated conference a year — although he’s been trying to spread his enthusiasm for triboelectricity at larger physics meetings.

Now that groups are beginning to identify the parameters that matter most for some charge transfers, Waitukaitis hopes that physicists’ understanding of the phenomenon will be rounded out. “I’m not sure we’re making things simpler,” he adds. “But we’re doing what is necessary to make sense of this.”

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