Ball lightning has mystified scientists and witnesses for centuries, appearing as glowing orbs during thunderstorms that seem to defy physics. While thousands of people report seeing these luminous ...

As so often happens in science, when Andrea Stöllner's experiments didn't work as expected, they led her to something even more interesting – a way to study what might be the initial spark of ...

A nuclear engineer reacts to a wild hypothetical from XKCD and breaks down what would really happen if all the lightning on Earth struck a single location at once. Using real physics, energy ...

Lightning researchers expect lightning could become more frequent as temperatures rise. Photo by Rick Lipscomb, courtesy NOAA. The age-old maxim says lightning never strikes the same place twice.