The Name Has Been Misleading People for Two Centuries Almost everybody believes a lightning ...

Benjamin Franklin is credited with inventing the lightning rod, and for some 270 years it has remained the main tool for protecting buildings from destructive and potentially deadly thunderbolts. But ...

Brazilian researchers captured on camera the brief moment when lightning rods on buildings released an upward discharge to attract incoming lightning. By Nicholas Bakalar Benjamin Franklin invented ...

Forest fires, power cuts and damaged infrastructure…lightning fascinates and destroys in equal measure, causing as many as 24,000 deaths a year worldwide not to mention widespread destruction. Even ...

Experiments on a Swiss mountain demonstrate that a high-powered laser can influence the trajectory of lightning strikes—a step toward laser-based lightning protection. A laser fired into the sky near ...

With a high-speed camera and the luck of being in the right place at the right time, physicist Marcelo Saba, a researcher at Brazil's National Space Research Institute (INPE), and Ph.D. candidate ...

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Listen to the latest science news, with Benjamin Thompson and Shamini Bundell. Your browser does not support the audio element. Scientists have shown that a specially ...