Scott Waitukaitis

And again, like I said, you know, recently was shown that kind of dust, dust derived sparks are also occurring on Mars.

You know, that gives the exciting possibility that maybe even on Mars, you have this kind of prebiotic chemistry.

The other kind of fundamental exciting thing is in the earliest stages of planet formation, you have a bunch of tiny oxide particles, basically.

And when a planet like Earth is really small, it's hard to get these particles to stick together.

But if they get charged up, they actually want to stick together more, just like a balloon in hair.

But if we want to know if that actually happens in some planet-forming disk that you can see with a telescope, you have to have an idea of the mechanism, because obviously we can't go there and just measure it.

So those are the lofty things.

The more practical things, this effect occurs whenever you touch any two things together.

It's happening right now, just like rubbing your shirt.

It's happening, you know, putting your phone in your pocket.

It's happening with every step you take in your shoes.

And that's actually giving access to a lot of energy that you could use.

And in fact, people are building devices that like go in your clothes that you could plug your phone into or you could charge it just by walking around.

So there's, you know, a lot of technological applications if you can take advantage of this energy that's released from static electricity.