[El Sordo]

Anyone want to put that in layman's terms for those of us who are not electrically inclined?

[John Locke]

Run a current through some spheres and they start to rotate. Not enough detail in the story to say why - could be the old right-hand rule; could be some interaction with the Earth's magnetic field. One thing for sure - nobody is creating angular momentum out of thin air.

Not particularly new - Toshiro Higuchi at the University of Tokyo has been working on applications of electrostatic rotation for several years now. And I don't see what is so exciting - the idea that macroscopic "rotation" has anything to do with quantum mechanical "spin" seems totally off the wall.

[waspguy]

On a quick read:

Basic understanding of the Electric force says that it simply has a radial component - no angular dependence. (It only pushes or pulls along the line separating the two charges.)

This result would seem to indictate that there is a (as yet unknown) component of electricity which causes things to want to rotate around some axis as well.

My gut feeling is to be pretty sceptical. My first objection is a symetry objection - how would the charge be able to decide which axis to rotate around? There would have to be some prefered directionality in space-time for this to be true, and that's not observed in other places.

On the other hand, we have no idea why electron's exhibit magnetic moments and have an associated "spin". If there is some effect like this - then the electron (and proton) spin might necessarily follow.

(Interesting side note - neutrons have spin and yet are electrically neutral. I've seen this attributed to the magnetic moments of the constituent quarks - I wonder if there's a way to test the new model via this mechanism?)

Ah well - I think I'll wait for other verification. If true this is certainly unexpected.

[RightWhale]

Anyone want to put that in layman's terms

This is already in layman's terms.