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There comes a point in everyone’s lives that you have to admit there are things you just can’t do. I’m going out on a limb here to say that Melvin Roberts’s un-doable thing is going outside, ever. Monday, the South Carolina man was attempting to cover his lawnmower as a shower moved in; he woke up in an ambulance after his neighbors found him unconscious on his lawn.
Roberts suffered burns and blisters on his legs and feet — mild scrapes compared to the last strike, in 2007, which put him in a wheelchair for more than a year.
That bolt hit while he was outside covering up his chickens.
“I went to cover my chickens up, and I believe it was clear,” he told the station. “But when I woke up, I was all bloody and burned and confused and had my little chickens lying with their feet up.”
All the strikes have forced Roberts to quit his job as a heavy equipment operator. He said he will finally think twice before heading out in stormy weather.
“I ain’t saying be afraid of it, but I’m going to have to learn to give it a little respect,” he said.
The human lightning rod thinks that all the strikes might be cosmic punishment for being something of a heartbreaking chick magnet.
“I’ve been married five times and I’ve been hit by lightning five times,” he said. “(My wife) says this is the sixth time. I’m not leaving my wife, so I’m going to have to try to do something different.”
Link | Image: IRO/TV
But no, this is some sort of instrument used by the people at the Lightning Research Laboratory at the University of Florida. They’ve got some amazing photos and videos linked in their sidebar. Check ‘em out. Link -via DVICE
Worldwide lightning strikes for the six month period May-Oct 2010 have been compiled into a database and plotted on maps. Embedded above is the distribution of lightning in the United States; the deep purple color represents 32 ground strikes within a 20-km grid.
A map of worldwide lightning distribution is available at the Accu-Weather link.
Butt Lightning – $13.95 and Butt Station – $15.95
If you like the Butt Station desktop organizer we featured before on Neatorama, you’ll love this: Butt Lightning from the NeatoShop. Yes, it’s a pen, paper clips and business card holder, but the main feature is the lightning bolt-shaped letter opener.
Link | More Fun and Unusual Office & Desk Stuff
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This video of a lightning bolt was filmed at 9,000 frames per second. The entire minute-and-a-half video covers less than two seconds of real time. Is this cool or what? -via Dr. Isis
In this purely scientific exploration of speed, we get to see who the real speed demon is in the browser wars. Google Chrome beats out the mighty potato canon like it was nothing. Lightning doesn’t even stand a chance.
– via gizmodo
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by calebkraft.
According to a Japanese farming folklore, mushroom harvest will be good when there’s a lot of lightning.
Sounds like nonsense? Not so fast: scientists have discovered that electricity does make some species of mushroom multiply.
As part of a four-year study, scientists in northern Japan have been bombarding a variety of mushrooms in lab-based garden plots with artificially induced lightning to see if electricity actually makes the fungi multiply.
The latest results show that lightning-strength jolts of electricity can more than double the yield of certain mushroom species compared with conventional cultivation methods.
"We have tried these experiments with ten types of mushroom so far and have found that it is effective in eight species," said Koichi Takaki, an associate professor in engineering at Iwate University.
"We saw the best effects in shiitake and nameko mushrooms, while we also tested reishi mushrooms, which are not edible but are used in certain types of traditional Chinese medicine," he said.
Natalie Avon writes in Popular Science that between 1995 and 2008, 82% of people in the US killed by lightning were male. The experts that she consulted agreed that this was due to behavioral, rather than biological factors:
Peter Todd, a behavioral psychologist at Indiana University, suspects the difference between the sexes boils down to the basic risk-versus-reward systems that have been part of our biological wiring for thousands of years. For women, Todd explains, the priorities are to protect one’s reproductive role and to care for offspring, which outweighs any inclination to attract potential mates by exhibiting bold behavior.
But for men, Todd says, the risk of getting struck by lightning could be outweighed by the reward of proving to other men—and potential female mates—that they’re not afraid of getting struck by lightning. This is particularly true for young men, who have the most to gain by impressing others, thereby raising their status as attractive, daring, healthy mates in the dating pool. And then, zap!
Image: flickr user Kevin Miller, used under Creative Commons license.
We live in a very bizarre world with all kinds of forces playing against each other. Between electricity, wind, atmospheric pressure and plasmas, there are some very specific combinations that, when paired together just right, can create incredibly strange phenomena. Here are a few examples of what nature is capable of – many of these occurrences are so extraordinary they have yet to be explained.
Red sprites are weak, but massive red flashes in the sky that appear above active thunder storms. While people claimed to have seen things that were probably red sprites in the past, the documentation of these phenomena are still relatively new – the first accidental images of red sprites were captured in 1989. Part of the reason we learned about them so late is that they only last for a few milliseconds. One thing that at least makes them a little easier to trace is the fact that sprites rarely occur alone; there are usually clusters of three or more together at once.
Because the phenomena are still so new to scientists, there is no official explanation for the cause of these flashes. However, evidence suggests they tend to occur in decaying portions of storms and are somehow created by the discharge of positive energy created by large cloud-to-ground lightning rays.
Blue jets are closely related to red sprites, as they are observed in many of the same storm settings. These phenomena are upward cones of bright blue light that appears to be coming out of the cloud above thunder storms. Similar to red sprites, they were not discovered until 1989.
Blue jets are not directly related to lightning like red sprites are and they are less common. They do seem to be more common in storms that involve hail. Scientists are still very unsure why blue jets occur, but they believe they are related to the collection or discharge of energy from lightning storms. The bright blue color is believed to be related to molecular nitrogen emissions when they collide with oxygen at a high speed.
St. Elmo’s fire is a eerie, but beautiful phenomenon where luminous blue plasma shoots from the extremities of an object. It was most commonly seen on ships in the olden days, which is why it was named for St. Erasmus, the patron saint of sailors. Anything with a point may be subject to St. Elmo’s fire, including cattle horns.
The “fire” occurs when a grounded object is inside of an atmospheric electric field, usually in a thunderstorm. What you see is actually plasma created by a discharge of energy on the point.
Image Via Cop4cbt
Fire whirls are created by two distinct factors, either a tornado that spins too close to a forest fire, or a whirling vortex of flame occurring in an area due to too much heat in a close proximity. The image above shows an artificially created fire whirl. Some whirls reach over a half a mile high.
These whirls are, not surprisingly, extraordinarily dangerous. In the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Japan, a fire whirl was created in a massive firestorm. The whirl alone killed 38,000 people who were packed into an open space in the Former Army Clothing Depot during the earthquake.
Fire whirls are created when a warm updraft converges with the wildfire. Most fire whirls are between 30 and 200 feet tall and under 10 feet wide. They generally last no more than a few minutes, but some have lasted as long as 20.
Image Via Hanroanu
Waterspouts look like mini-tornados made of water and they are always located below a cloud and above a body of water. While they seem to suck up liquid from the water they are located above, they are actually made of water droplets formed by condensation.
While there are occasionally strong water spouts, most are weak and caused by the clash of atmospheric dynamics forming a vortex. In most cases, waterspouts are created while the cloud they are attached to is still developing.
In one month of 2001, colored rain fell on the Kerala region of India. Most of the rains were red, but some where yellow, green or black. Many compared the red rain to blood, making it quite a terrifying spectacle for anyone superstitious. There have been stories about red rain sightings in the area as early as 1896, but none were so long-lasting or vivid as the 2001 downpour.
A number of theories spread about the cause of the colored rain, including its relation to aliens, before an official report concluded that the colors were caused by algae spores sucked into the atmosphere by a waterspout. There are a number of these algae species in the region, which could explain why the stories were so constant for the last hundred years.
Scientists believe those pesky waterspouts are responsible for one of the most bizarre weather experiences in the world, the dropping of animals from the sky. Many different animals have rained from the sky, including frogs, birds, bats, worms and fish. Some animals actually survive the process, but most die in the fall. In some cases, the animals actually freeze to death while in the clouds and dropped to the ground in an ice casing.
Waterspouts seem like the most likely causes of these events because the high-speed winds can lift animals into the air and carry them for lengthy distances. One thing that still baffles scientists though is why each incident only involves one specific species of animal, where in most cases a waterspout seems to be likely to suck up multiple similarly-sized animals in one area.
While this bizarre weather event is a rare occurrence in most places, it is actually common in Honduras, where the residents celebrate the yearly Lluvia de Peces (Rain of Fish). An even weirder aspect of this occurrence is the fact that the fish that are rained down do not live in the area at all. National Geographic researchers predict they live in underground water sources, but there is still no proof for this theory.
Birds and bats, of course, would be subject to a completely different process than the fish and frogs. In their case, it is most likely that the storm overtook them while in flight. Naturally, there is a lot less mystery and contention when it comes to these occurrences.
Image Via Simon Goldenberg [Flickr]
There were many times between 1813 and 1952 when London was overtaken with a thick, black fog. What made these fogs different than everyday fog most of us are familiar with is that in most instances, it actually killed people. The first event lasted for a week and visibility became so poor that even the most knowledgeable Londoners could no longer find their way through the city. In a 1873 black fog, the death rates in London were said to raise by 40%.
However, the real killer was the fog of January 26, 1880. The fog carried a thick mix of factory pollutants and coal smog that was heavy in sulfur dioxide. It stayed for three days and it is estimated that up to 12,000 people died from the fog. There were more fogs in following years that killed people, but it wasn’t til the fog of 1952 that killed 4,000 people until England finally took a stand to start fighting the pollution that made the fogs so deadly.
It’s an old trope in comedy that someone commits a sin and God gets their attention with a bolt of lightning. The real life version played out in the woods near Wert, Germany. Jens Gottlieb and his girlfriend Lisa Gruhn were feeling frisky, pulled off the highway, headed into the forest, and stripped naked. A bolt of lightning struck the ground near them! They started running as a torrential downpour began.
They lost their way and were spotted blundering around in the dark by another motorist in a parking space who called police.
Officers who arrived a short while later managed to find the naked and shivering pair and help them into dry clothes and took them home.
Bet they won’t do that again. Link -via Buzzfeed
(image credit: Flickr user kainet)
When it’s not their time to go, it’s not their time to go – regardless of what some people did, they just wouldn’t die. Jumping out of a 5th story apartment, getting hit by lightnings not once, not twice but seven times, or sticking a head inside a particle accelerator didn’t kill them.
Here’s three amazing stories of survival, of people who cheated certain deaths in the course of their lives. Take, for instance, Roy Sullivan, the guy who’s been hit by lightning 7 times:
They say that lightning never strikes the same place twice. Tell that to Roy Sullivan, who was struck a total of Seven Times In his life.
He was struck in 1942, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1976 and 1977. Supposedly, he developed a case of paranoia after the third time and became convinced a higher power was out to get him. Mind you, considering the odds of being struck by lightning ONCE in 80 years are 576,000 to one, and the odds of being struck by lightning seven times are 10^25 to one, can you blame him?
Strangely it was not the lightning that killed him. He killed himself over unrequited love.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Evis03.
What do you get when you put a marching band on segways, then set them on fire? Here’s Glissendo, a street performance by Le Snob at the French art festival, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass (concept and technical design by Ulik, the Mechanical Clown)
Miss Cellania has the video clip: Link [embedded YouTube clip]
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Why Canada Is So Dangerous Link (strong language) (From a comment on VideoSift, this appears to be from a 80s law enforcement training video "Surviving Edged Weapons") |
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Qui-Gon, Worst Jedi Ever? After watching the clip, I must agree: Link |
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World's BEST Fan-Made Music Video Watch it and weep: Link |
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When Lightnings Strike! Do yourself a favor, skip the stupid intro and fast foward to 1:00: Link (strong language) |
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Blanket-napper Dog Why, my wife does the same thing to me every night :) Link (quick, where's my slanket?) |
When Mount Redoubt volcano in Alaska showed signs of erupting several months ago, researchers from New Mexico went there with the latest technology to measure the phenomenon.
The Lightning Mapping Array allows users to ‘see through’ the dust and ash, and observe the lightning generated within the eruption. The results were some stunning images and valuable data in the study of volcanoes.
(Photo: Bretwood Higman)
“First, we see an eruptive or explosive phase,” physics professor Paul Krehbiel said. “Electrical activity is continuous and strong. We see a lot of small electrical discharges as hot gasses come out of the volcano.”
The second phase involves the ash cloud as it drifts away from the volcano with the wind. This phase is punctuated by discrete lightning – or lightning bolts.“After the explosion is over, there is a subsequent phase of plume lightning,” Krehbiel said. “Full-fledged lightning occurs in the cloud of ash and water both above and downwind of the volcano.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
Lush Collection is a lightnings series where the products have been created using cocktail umbrellas.
But wait, there’s more – they are dipped in phosphorescent paint, which makes them glow in the dark.
