Forest fires, power cuts and damaged infrastructure…lightning fascinates and destroys in equal measure, causing as many as 24,000 deaths a year worldwide not to mention widespread destruction. Even ...

GREENSBORO, N.C. — A Triad home is a total loss after a lightning strike hit it. By the time firefighters got to the home on Pheasant Lane in Winston-Salem, flames were coming out of the rooftop. This ...

Like a high-tech hammer of Thor, a powerful laser can grab hold of a lightning bolt and reroute its path through the sky. In a mountaintop experiment, such a laser bent lightning toward a lightning ...

Lightning rods have been used to guide lightning strikes for centuries, but now scientists have demonstrated something a bit more advanced than a humble metal stick. Beaming a high-powered laser into ...

Benjamin Franklin is credited with inventing the lightning rod, and for some 270 years it has remained the main tool for protecting buildings from destructive and potentially deadly thunderbolts. But ...

Brazilian researchers captured on camera the brief moment when lightning rods on buildings released an upward discharge to attract incoming lightning. By Nicholas Bakalar Benjamin Franklin invented ...

Lightning rods (and the accompanying protection system) are designed to protect a house or building from a direct lightning strike and, in particular, a lightning-initiated fire. Note that lightning ...