New tractor beam has potential to tame lightning

Lightning never strikes twice, so the saying goes, but new technology may allow us to control where it hits the ground, reducing the risk of catastrophic bushfires.

The cosmic start of lightning

Even though lightning is a common phenomenon, the exact mechanism triggering a lightning discharge remains elusive. Scientists at the Dutch national research institute for mathematics CWI, the University of Groningen and ...

Early Earth's atmosphere was less conducive to lightning

In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey made sparks fly in a gas-filled flask meant to reflect the composition of Earth's atmosphere around 3.8 billion years ago. Their results suggested that lightning could have led to prebiotic ...

Researchers get rare lightning video

A team of Florida Institute of Technology researchers led by Associate Professor Ningyu Liu has captured rare and hard-to-predict upward-moving lightning discharges on video, allowing for the study of this phenomenon in a ...

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