What am I looking at? A tree that got it’s bark ripped off by lighting.

TIL: the reason why lightning can do this is…The water is pumped through this area, upwards to the leaves. When lightning strikes, it brings this water to a boil, cause a steam explosion which blows the bark from the tree.

TIL:

The Sakurajima volcano in southern Japan was caught erupting in early January. Magma bubbles so hot they glow and shoot away as liquid rock bursts through the Earth’s surface from below. Photographer Martin Rietze .

[Cheers laughingsquid]

I am going to say it again casue it sounds so evil….scientists and engineers at Picatinny Arsenal are busy developing a device that will shoot lightning bolts down laser beams to destroy its target.

The weapon idea mimics the way that lightning leaps from thunderclouds to strike the ground — the electricity follows the path of least resistance.

So how much power are we talking? According to lead scientist on the project, George Fischer:

“If a laser beam is intense enough, its electro-magnetic field is strong enough to rip electrons off of air molecules, creating plasma,” said Fischer. “This plasma is located along the path of the laser beam, so we can direct it wherever we want by moving a mirror.

To put the energy output in perspective, a big filament light bulb uses 100 watts. The optical amplifier output is 50 billion watts of optical power.”

I am not sure what would be more destructive the Navy’s railgun superweapon capable of hurling hypersonic projectiles over 50 to 100 miles, or the Army’s future ‘Zeus’ division with their guns that shot lightning bolts instead of bullets?

[Cheers army]

Kinda looks like they are dropping off some packages into the water. UFO’s?

[Cheers kazatormentas]

This unbelievable picture was taken during a wicked storm rocked San Francisco last night, by photographer Phil McGrew who rigged his camera to a take long exposure shots (about 20 seconds).

Mr McGrew, 49, was shocked at the striking image which shows the split-second moment of electric forks hitting the span of the Bay Bridge. You can count the strikes, the Bay Bridge has four distinct towers and you can see the lightning hitting each tower.

Bazinga!

[Cheers dailymail]

There are more than 16 million lightning storms in the world every year. The average bolt of lightning carries an electric current of more than 40,000 amperes and transfers a charge of five coulombs and 500 megajoules of energy.

Taking those words to heart is a trio from Serbia who received honourable mentions at the 2011 Skyscraper Competition for their Hydra skyscraper concept.

In an attempt to capture the clean burning Hydrogen power and use it as a source of energy, the Hydra Skyscraper harvests energy from lightning storms, this energy is then used to split water into hydrogen gas through electrolysis and then stores the power in several mega-batteries located at the base. The exoskeleton is built from a high thermal and electric conductivity structure called Grapheme, which is claimed to be two hundred times stronger than steel.

The project, which most likely would be stationed in the tropics, where 70% of all lightning occurs (Singapore, Venezuela, Central Florida), will also includes a research facility, housing, and recreational areas for scientists and their families.

[Cheers inhabitat.com]

The picture above is a long-exposure picture taken Thursday of the ash plume rising from Shinmoedake peak, one of the calderas of the Kirishima volcano complex.

Shinmoedake began erupting Wednesday, coating nearby villages and farms with ash and prompting authorities to ask for voluntary evacuations within a 1.2-mile radius…RUN!

Remember when Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted?

Blasts of white-hot lightning crackled above it as clouds of volcanic ash snarled European air traffic for nearly a week.

[Cheers nationalgeographic.com]

Using a custom-built camera the size of a refrigerator capable of snapping 10 million frames per second, Florida researchers have made the world’s first crude pictures of X-rays streaming from a stroke of lightning.

Florida researchers pointed the camera at a launch tower where they sent rockets soaring with trailing copper wire – a modern-day Ben Franklin experiment to trigger lightning.

“It’s been 250 years since Franklin’s kite experiment, and only within the last decade [eight years ago] we found that lightning emits X-rays,” said Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla.

The images are beyond blurry. They look like near-abstract blotches of white and green, better deciphered when displayed in a series with a rough sketch of the lightning tip superimposed.

“You can see the X-ray source descending,”  Dwyer, told a group of lightning specialists gathered Monday in San Francisco. “You start to see the air glow in X-rays.”

The fridge-sized X-ray lightning camera sits pointed at the rocket launch site where researchers try to trigger lightning

[Cheers livescience.com]