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Thousands of lightning bolts strike the Earth’s surface roughly every couple of seconds, but despite their ubiquity this phenomena is somewhat poorly understood. Lightning is also unpredictable. While humans have been placing lightning rods for centuries to increase the probability of striking in a certain fixed point, its path can not be controlled. That may be true in nature, but in the confinement of a lab of the INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications research centre (Varennes, QC, Canada), scientists have defied this common knowledge and used lasers to coax lighting to follow a predefined path.
originally posted by: Bedlam
You can also do that by running helium balloons up into the thundercloud on wire leaders.
originally posted by: verschickter
a reply to: pryingopen3rdeye
I think this was on ATS some years ago
www.theregister.co.uk...
Ionatron stock fell off a cliff. The firm renamed itself, but nonetheless faced huge shareholder anger and earlier this month (2009/08) was forced to cough up $6.5m to settle a class-action lawsuit.
while the topic ive posted here is about actual successful laboratory experimentation, and recent to boot (June 23, 2015)