Fighting out of control fires could become faster and more eco-friendly with an unusual technique that snuffs out flames using blasts of electrical waves. The discovery could underpin a new genre of fire-fighting devices, including sprinkler systems that suppress fires not with water, but with zaps of electric current, without soaking and irreparably damaging the contents of a home, business, or other structure.
Reporting at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Ludovico Cademartiri, Ph.D., and his colleagues in the group of George M. Whitesides, Ph.D., at Harvard University, picked up on a 200-year-old observation that electricity can affect the shape of flames, making flames bend, twist, turn,
