Ball Lightning Created In the Lab 190
EWAdams writes to point us to a New Scientist report that the mysterious phenomenon of ball lighting has now been created in a Brazilian research lab. The phenomenon has long been reported anecdotally but never explained or understood. Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang, but have had little success in producing working examples. From the article: "A more down-to-earth theory... is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapor. As the vapor cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then... they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds." Here is a movie of the phenomenon.
Re:Obligatory statement (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Having seen 'ball lightning'... (Score:1, Funny)
I've seen ball lightening (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Bigger! Like a rabbit! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bigger! Like a rabbit! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Hmm? Something is missing (Score:3, Funny)
Try "explanation".
inventing things out of order (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:4, Funny)
Wouldn't it be a great way to signal excessive load on a server? Except that then microsoft would embrace and extend the idea with ballMer lightning, which also throws chairs at you if it spots license irregularities.
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:inventing things out of order (Score:5, Funny)
Bloody type one decks
Re:Fascinating (Score:4, Funny)
Just don't tell me when they create a Lord of the Pit, the U.S. has a hard enough time preserving marshland's as it is.
The Boxen (Score:5, Funny)
I have squandered my existence on some packets full of numbers such are data files
All porn and jest
Still the NAT hears what it wants to hear
and access denies the rest
Oh yes, access denies the rest
In the NOC there stands a boxen
and a server by its trade
and it carries the reminders
of every luser guest that logged on
and downloaded till it cried out
in its full Slashdotted shame
"My CPU is burning, but the hard drive still remains"
Yes, the data still remains . . .
Dee oh Ees *kissssssh*
Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh Ees
Dee oh Ees *kissssssh*
Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh Ees
KFG
Re:Slashdotted Video? (Score:5, Funny)
That's not ball lightening, that's just shrinkage. Happens to men when they're swimming all the time. Usually not when the water's in the eighties though.
Yeah, that's typical too.
The next obvious step (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting conversion (Score:3, Funny)
True. An interesting side effect of all of this is that we now know that 3 red mana = 140 amps.
Re:Flipflops?! (Score:2, Funny)