Anze Furlan/Getty Images/EyeEm Ice has an electrical charge, which could be exploited to create devices that easily defrost car windows and aeroplane wings. As frost forms, its exposed surface becomes warmer than its lower layers, which are shielded from the air. This temperature difference causes positively and negatively charged ions within the frost to sink. The positive ions seem to move faster – why is unclear – so the bottom of the frost becomes more positively charged than the top. Advertisement Jonathan Boreyko at Virginia Tech and his colleagues wanted to use this natural phenomenon to develop a tool to remove frost. “We wanted to know if we could exploit that charge to rip the frost itself off the substrate,” he says.