Based on what we know about the history of Earth, life is thought to have taken root here somewhere around 4 billion years ago, give it take a few hundred million years. That’s an extremely large window of time when the very first single-celled organisms may have emerged, and scientists still aren’t sure exactly how …
Lightning strikes that we see here on the surface are only one kind of storm phenomenon, and others happen in places we can’t see from the ground. Lightning also produces incredible sights in the space above the clouds, extending into the atmosphere in colors that we never see from a cloud-to-ground lightning bolt. A new …
Researchers have long studied how lightning works in the hopes of better understanding why it acts the way it does and why it hits some things but not others. A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters is accompanied by a high-speed camera video that reveals something incredibly interesting about lightning strikes. When a lightning …
The death toll from lightning strikes in the United States is at a record low. Fewer people are dying from being struck by lightning than in years past, due to a variety of factors. Less intense thunderstorms may be temporarily skewing the numbers down. The coronavirus pandemic has cost well over 200,000 lives in the …
NASA’s Juno orbiter has observed lightning rolling across the tops of the gas giant Jupiter’s cloud tops. Massive bolts of lightning have previously been detected deep within the planet, but this is the first time lightning has been observed at such a high altitude. The researchers believe that ammonia in the upper atmosphere is acting …
When severe thunderstorms roll through your neck of the woods one of the biggest concerns is always the risk of a tornado. A swirling vortex of high-speed wind and debris can cause incredible damage, but as residents of Fort Worth, Texas, were recently reminded, lightning can wreak havoc, too. A ridiculously powerful bolt of lightning …
Apple sees nothing wrong with charging $19 for a single Lightning-to-USB cable and $9 for the privilege of using your headphones with your $1,000 phone, so it’s no real surprise that the trade in fake Apple accessories is rampant. If you’ve ever spent any time on Aliexpress — or in your local bodega — you’ve …
Earlier today, Belkin “finally” launched the world’s first battery pack that charges off a Lightning port. This is a great achievement, if you consider the world’s most valuable company bullying the rest of the world into accepting a proprietary standard for commonplace electronics an achievement, but I digress. There’s another, much more sensible reason to …
Jupiter is a massive, swirling mass of towering storm clouds, and anyone who lives on Earth knows that storms are fantastic at producing lightning. When NASA sent its Voyager 1 spacecraft on its trip through our Solar System, its flyby of Jupiter revealed that Jupiter does indeed have lightning, but it wasn’t producing the same …
Thunderstorms can produce some pretty impressive light shows for us here on Earth, but spotting it from space can prove a tricky task. Determining exactly where lightning is striking the surface can give weather forecasters and scientists important insights into how storms behave, and that information is crucial to advanced warning systems. The National Oceanic …
