Tag archive: lightning

Trekkers, you can start blueprinting those warp drives now. Scientists have finally found antimatter, and it's emitted every time lightning strikes, reports the American Astronomical Society.  Antimatter, though usually the subject of science fiction, is the opposite of matter. In antimatter, protons have negative charges, electrons have positive charges, etc. Though lightning storms have been known to spur gamma-ray flashes, the Fermi… Read More

Summer is reaching its height in the northern hemisphere, and with it has come another round of speculation whether cell phones—or Apple's ubiquitous iPod media players—attract lightning. In 2005, a Canadian jogger was struck by lightning while listening to his iPod; the bolt threw him two and a half meters, ruptured his eardrums, and left him with a broken jaw and a Y-shaped burn on his neck and chest where electricity… Read More

The odds of being struck by lightning are, by scientific and common-sense accounts, not very high. But it does happen, and the proliferation of mobile phones around the world