Dr. Victor Petrenko, an ice engineer and physicist at Dartmouth College's Ice Research Lab in New Hampshire, has developed built-in electronic brakes that are turned on and off by a speed-monitoring sensor built into the skis or snowboard.
Dr. Petrenko's brakes involve two main wires, one positive and one negative, running along the entire length of each ski's or snowboard's underside. The wires get their respective charges from opposite ends of a three-volt battery. Smaller wires branch off the two arterial ones, covering the entire base.
The wires themselves cannot slow the skis down, but when in contact with ice or snow—substances, Dr. Petrenko explains, that can hold a charge—the positive electrodes on the skis induce a negative charge on the ice and the negative electrodes on the skis induce a positive charge on the ice. And as any elementary physics textbook states, opposite charges attract—the ski/snowboard is pulled closer into the snow.
http://www.outsidemag.com/news/headlines/20020214_1.html
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