Science Friday - Lightning, Electric Scooters, News Roundup. Aug. 16, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

Lightning during a heavy rainstorm is one of the most dramatic phenomena on the planet—and it happens, somewhere on Earth, an estimated 50 to 100 times a second. But even though scientists have been puzzling over the physics of lightning for decades, stretching back even to Ben Franklin’s kite experiment, much of the science remains mysterious. Ira and IEEE Spectrum news editor Amy Nordrum speak with Farhad Rachidi, a lightning researcher at Säntis Tower in Switzerland, as well as Bill Rison, a professor of electrical engineering at New Mexico Tech and Ryan Said, a research scientist at Vaisala, about what potentially causes lightning, lightning-sparked wildfires, and why it's hard to study it in a lab. Plus: Scooters are electric, emission-free, and must be replacing gas-guzzling car trips. That has to be good for the climate, right? But a new study in the journal Environmental Research Letters says electric scooters actually aren’t very green. Sigal Samuel, a staff writer for Vox based in Washington D.C., joins Ira to talk more about the study. And this week, the Trump administration announced it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is implemented starting in September. Regulators would soon be able to conduct economic assessments to decide whether a species should be protected or not. Maggie Koerth-Baker, senior science reporter for FiveThiryEight, joins Ira to discuss the roll back as well as other science headlines in this week's News Roundup. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, it's a lightning pelusa. We're going to meet the researchers who are probing the high-voltage mysteries of our atmosphere. You think you knew everything there was about lightning? Oh, no. We'll talk about what's still left to know. But first, this week, the Trump administration announced that we'd change the way the Endangered Species Act is implemented starting in September. Regulators would soon be able to conduct economic assessment. to decide whether a species should be protected or not.

The legislative overhaul would not only make it easier to take species off the endangered list, but it would also weaken protections for ones that remain on the list. Judging me now have to talk about that and other stories from the weekend science is Maggie Kerth Baker, senior science reporter at 538. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me.

So this is a new way of evaluating endangered species, different from what we already have in place, right? Right. So historically, the process of adding animals onto the endangered species Protection Act list has been really all about scientific evidence. You know, what data suggests that the species is in danger, how endangered is it, how important is it to the functioning of the ecosystem, that kind of thing. But now under these new rules,

the regulators are also be allowed to consider cold hard cash, like the money that a timber company might not make if it can't cut trees in a certain patch of forest. And these regulations, they also now change the timelines so that the risks have to be in the quote-unquote foreseeable future, which is this kind of vague designation that could really be used to prevent protection from longer-term risks. So I imagine that scientists are not very happy about this. No. Some of the scientists have said that under these new timelines, for instance, it would be almost impossible to designate the polar bear as endangered because the sea ice loss in the Arctic is a longer-term problem than a short-term one. Oh, details, details. Let's move on to the next one.

The first human CRISPR clinical trials are starting in the U.S. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this week, scientists announced the beginning of these first official clinical trials. They're going to be using CRISPR to treat blood disease, cancer, and inherited blindness. And you probably are remembering that last year there was a Chinese scientist who had announced that he'd edited the genes of embryos using CRISPR technology. These trials are different than that. for one thing, they're being done in adults and children, not embryos. So these changes that are being made aren't things that could be inherited or passed on to future generations.

And of course, there's also the whole legitimacy aspect. You know, this is having ethics oversight and transparency, and it's not secret under the table experiments. But we still don't know how well this is going to work. Science News, as Tina Hesman-Say had a really good article where she pointed out that, you know, other kinds of promising genetic therapies haven't turned out to be useful in practices. were in theory. People have died during gene therapy trials, and in one case, treatment seemed to help blind people see better, but then the effects didn't last. So this is going to be targeted at first for blindness? One of the things that's going to be targeted at is blindness and

also blood disease and cancer. Any concerns about there may be off target, you know, the CRISPR's had problems with that? Yeah, that is definitely a concern. And it's something where there's a lot of experimentation. You know, we have a lot of these things that work pretty well in theory, work pretty well in mice, and then you get into humans, and it's something else entirely. Let's move on to Columbia. This is a story we've been talking about for years. It seems to be finally happening that Colombia has a state of national emergency about bananas. Right. So the past is prologue in the fruit industry. Back in 1950s, we lost nearly the entire banana industry when a fungus came through and killed off whole plantations. It completely shifted

the way we eat bananas. We use a different variety now than your grandparents did. And it seems like the same thing is happening. There's this fungus called Tropical Race 4 that has killed trees all over Asia and Africa. And it was first reported in Latin America in Colombia in June. And now those infections have been confirmed. And if you like bananas, this should be a pretty scary thing. There's no known resistant variety to replace the current banana that we use. And this tropical race

for fungus, it can live in soil for decades. So once a plantation is infested, it's pretty much done for. Because we all use one banana, right? Just about everybody eats the same banana. This is a function of monoculture. There have started to be different

other varieties of bananas that have turned up in stores in recent years. But predominantly we are using one variety of banana that is grown on hundreds of thousands of acres of land, and that makes it kind of an easy target for illness. And there's no way to really stop the fungus. No, there's not. It spreads incredibly easily.

This is kind of one of those things where even walking in an infected plantation and then going to a different plantation could spread it. The Cavendish banana may be soon gone. Mm-hmm. Wow. Maybe we'll get some of those little bananas. I like the little ones. Yeah, they're very tasty.

Who eats the whole banana. Okay, well, I'm moving on to our last topic. There was an article from live science that said the communities with the oldest people in the world, like Sardinia and Italy and Okinawa, might not actually be as old as we think they are? What's going on there? So I'm sure you've heard about the blue zones, you know, these places where lots of exceptionally old people live, and there's been all of these studies about what are they eating, how are they living? How can we replicate what they do? And there's this recent study that came out that was finding that these blue zones, these places, not only have some of the oldest people in the world, they also have lower than average life expectancies for everybody else. So you have this combination of a few extremely old people and then a lot of people who aren't living as long as other places that don't have the extremely old people. And that's starting to make some researchers sort of

of wonder what's going on. And one of the theories is that this could be an issue of faulty record keeping or even outright fraud. So the examples that they're sort of bringing up around this are that, you know, in the United States, we used to have a ton of supercentarians, like these people who lived past 100. But as we got better record keeping state by state, the number of supercentarians dropped dramatically. So in each state, the number of people over the age of 110 dropped by 69 to 82% when birth records started being kept better for those states. And that could be part of what's going on, because when you're talking about supercentarians right now, you're still talking about people born before modern record keeping. There's also transcription errors that could be

happening. There's also fraud that could be happening. So earlier this year, for instance, there was an investigation that looked into the story of Jean Calment, who was supposedly 122 when she died in France and has kind of long held this record of the oldest living human. But this new research suggests that she might have actually been the daughter of the real Jean Kalmette who took over her mother's identity to get a pension. So there are lots of reasons why we might be reporting people as older than they actually are. And so a lot of this research into blue zones may or may not actually be all that useful for anyone. Wow.

As I say, details, details, thank you. Thank you. Maggie Kerth Baker is Senior Science Reporter at 538. Now it's time to play Good Thing, Bad Thing, because every story has a flip side. You know, if you live in an urban environment, urban electric scooters are the latest rage from L.A. to Austin to Atlanta. People are scooting to get around.

These things are electric. by every stretch of the word, and there's no gas guzzling involved, and it's got to be good for the environment, right? Well, a new study in the journal Environmental Research Letter says not quite. Segal Samuel is here to fill us in. She's a staff writer for Vox in Washington. Seagal, welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me.

So tell us about the, what's the bad news about electric scooters? Well, I'm sorry to be the purveyor of bad science news, but unfortunately, the study seems to show that scooters are actually worse for the environment than the modes of transportation that they're displacing. Oh, give me the details, please. So, you know, the scooters themselves don't actually emit carbon dioxide or anything, so they're good in that sense, and they're certainly better than driving a car. But the researchers basically analyzed the life cycle of a scooter,

so what it takes to manufacture them, transport them around a city, the whole life cycle. They found that most of the harm to the climate comes from manufacturing the scooter and from transporting it around the city. Because at night, after we've dumped our scooters on the curb, these people called juicers or chargers are tasked with driving them around the city, you know, gathering them up in cars, which of course use gasoline, and then repositioning these scooters in places where people will ride them in the morning after they've been recharged. So you're negating the whole idea by driving them. around the city. Unfortunately, yeah, it's a pretty inefficient way to do this. Is there any good news about the scooters? Any good thing that's going on?

Well... They are better than cars, right? They are better than cars, and the study isn't all doom and gloom. It does make some concrete recommendations about how we could make scooters a legitimately green option, which, you know, for example, could include allowing scooters to remain in public areas overnight so that they don't need to be... move it around by car, even when they're 95% charged. We could also incentivize the use of efficient, you know, electric vehicles to collect and

redistribute them. We could streamline the collection and redistribution so that the juicers and chargers aren't wasting all this gas as they zigzag around the city, trying to find scooters to collect. You know, so there are some concrete things we could do to make this a green option. It's just right now, it's not actually a greener option than. say, riding a standard bus with a high ridership or riding a bicycle. And when the researchers looked at surveys, they found that half of the people riding scooters

say that they would have biked or walked if scooters weren't available. And of course, biking or walking are better for the environment than scooters. And I'm sure the scooter companies are responding by saying something wrong with the study or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. Lyme actually responded to the study and said, we think the study is based on assumptions and incomplete data. But actually, the study is pretty consistent with some previous research on scooters.

So it does appear to be pretty sound. I have my own solution. You know, we leave scooters around. We take them home. We charge them. We plug them in. And then we get a credit on our electric bill. So everybody can take a scooter.

Yeah, it's a pretty good idea, actually. And that's how private scooters work. So, you know. You know, I'm not a genius. but some things are a little easier. Thank you, Segal. My pleasure. Sigal Samuel is Staff writer for Vox based in Washington.

We're going to take a break and come back everything you wanted to know about lightning. Plus some things researchers are still mystified about. Give us a call. 844-724-8255. What would you like to know about lightning? 844-724-8255. We will have everything we can think about. And we'll be talking about it with Amy Nordrum, who's going to join me as a co-host for a while.

Stay with this. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know how the saying goes where there's thunder, there's lightning. Because, as you know, lightning's super hot flashes create the shockwave that we hear as thunder. Oh, I love that sound. You know, you would think all these centuries after Ben Franklin captured lightning in a bottle that we would know everything about it. But you know what? Lightning is more complicated and mysterious. than what old Ben could have imagined. Or what you might have learned in grade school,

like lightning's just a buildup of charge, grounding itself, right? Well, it's really not that simple. Researchers are still puzzling out what initiates the actual bolt. Which ones are the most dangerous? And how can we predict lightning to protect people and structures? A lightning bolt is more than meets the eye. Why does it flash? Why does it branch?

Why does a lightning flash sometimes start from the bottom, starting in tall buildings or structures, and flashing up, flashing up into the atmosphere, plus a few other mysteries. Our friend Amy Norgeram, news editor at the ICCLEE spectrum has been reporting in depth as scientists work to map the mysteries of lightning. Welcome, Amy. Hi, Ira. She's here to help me as my voice goes away. Good to have you here this week. If you have a question, our number is 844-8255. 844 SciTalk, or as usual, you can tweet us at SciFRI.

Let me bring in one of the researchers from Santis Tower. Dr. Farhad Rashidi is a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lusanne, Switzerland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira. Hi, Ira. Hi, Amy. Hi.

What would you get us started here? Yeah, Farhad, so what do we know about how lightning forms and storms and what triggers it to strike? Well, lightning is an electric discharge, the same kind of discharge that occurs when you walk across a carpet and charges are separated by friction. And when you get close to an object like a doorknob,

there is a discharge. And so these extra charges return to the ground. So lightning is to some extent similar to this phenomenon, except that its path, Its path length is a few kilometers. It's kind of a gigantic electrostatic discharge, which basically discharges two electrically charged region, either in the atmosphere or from a point in the atmosphere and the ground. And why does it happen in some storms, but not every storm? Because lightning requires that charges, positive and negative charges, be separated in the cloud.

And this happened in some of the clouds and in which there is an electrification process, which occurs, which is quite complex, following some convection processes, which is still being studied by scientists. So basically what happens is that there are these updrafts and various particles in the cloud gets, I mean, collide to each other and charges get separated. So typically you have ice crystals which become positively charged and move upward and the lower part of the cloud becomes negative, which is some kind of a mixture of ice and water. And so you need to have this charging. separation and this separation of the charge will generate an electric field. And it is when this electric field exceeds some kind of a specific threshold, then it creates

a breakdown and leads to the initiation of the lightning discharge. Now Amy, I understand that you've got started studying lightning because of a special tower that has an affinity for lightning bolts, it turns out. Yes, actually, this is a site called Santis Tower, which Farhad is very familiar with. That's how I originally started learning about it. I write for a publication that covers a lot of electronics and electrical technologies, but we're always writing about electricity that we produce and generate and distribute. And, you know, when I stumbled across the Santa's Tower research, I realized,

well, this is, you know, lightning is its own electrical phenomena that we really don't have that much to do with. And this mountaintop tower in the Swiss Alps is struck by lightning more than 100 times. a year, possibly more frequently struck than any other object on the planet. And Farhad and his team have instrumented it with all kinds of different gadgets to be able to understand and study lightning better. So what is the most mysterious fire? What's the most mysterious thing to you that we still don't know about how lightning works? Yeah, well, as you said, you know, more than 250 years ago, Benjamin Franklin,

demonstrated with his famous kite experience the electrical nature of lightning and nearly 300 years after and despite the lots of studies and considerable progress also lightning remains enigmatic and not fully understood and what is interesting isn't is that even the very initiation of the lighting discharge is not quite well understood so if I would like I mean if if I can summarize the thing is that in order to have lightning initiated you need an electric field exceeding a critical value and this value is about

1.5 million volts per meter at the altitude of about 5-6 kilometers. Now the problem is that despite extensive measurements either using balloons, aircraft, rockets, etc., fields inside such a the cloud have really exceeded 200,000 volts per meter. That is one-tenth the required field. And of course some explanations have been proposed by scientists to solve this puzzle.

For example, that it's possible that stronger fields exist only in a relatively small region, which make them difficult to measure. But there is another interesting discovery, some 20, 30 years, ago back in 1990. So it's quite recent where it has been demonstrated that lightning emits high energetic radiation. Actually, lightning is quite unique. I mean, there is no other phenomena, neither in nature nor man-made that produce electromagnetic fields in so wide spectrum,

from very low frequencies to radio frequencies to microwave and x-rays and gamma rays. And these studies have shown that the energies of x-rays and gamma rays can be quite high, even much higher sometimes than the energy of a chest x-ray. And this actually is interesting because it suggests the existence of energetic electrons which are moving extremely fast. And what is interesting is that there is a different type of discharge, which is called runaway breakdown, requires indeed a smaller electric field of about 200,000 volts per meter, which is consistent

with the data and which involves this energetic election. So this has been basically an important discovery in order to better understand the initiation of lightning, but still there are many obscure points as, for example, what are the seed particles that are producing, that are needed to produce this kind of specific breakdown. So I would say there are lots of things that are still unknown and people working on them, but even the very initiation of lightning

is still a mystery today. Let me bring on someone who works exactly. Good segue for me, Farad, because I want to bring out a researcher who works on understanding where lightning comes from, and that is Bill Reison. He is a professor of electrical engineering at New Mexico Tech in Albuquerque. Welcome, Bill.

Hi, thank you. What do you, you know, you were listening. Do we still not understand how lightning starts? We're starting to understand better how that happens. Farad talked about one mechanism as being what's called Relativeistic Runaway electron avalanche in which electrons are accelerated. smaller electric field but are still able to do relativistic properties to gain the necessary energy to start a discharge. However, our research, if you were to see

that, basically the discharge would propagate in the direction that the electrons are moving, which is in the opposite direction of the electric field. Our research is showing that the breakdown propagates in the direction of the electric field, opposite the direction the electrons are moving, so it's probably not relativistic runaway electron avalanche. It's something that you can't produce in the lab, because in the lab you can't get such strong fields over the distances needed. But it's a system of streamers.

A streamer is a electrical discharge, which doesn't actually heat up the air, but just freeze electrons. And it propagates, positive breakdown propagates in the direction. electric field, which is not what the relativistic runaway electron avalanche would predict. And Bill, do we know what might stir up these small pockets of more powerful electric fields and cause these breakdowns to form in the first place?

Well, it's not really a small pocket of a field. It basically is a field which probably extends 500 meters or so in distance. And it's just something that we haven't seen in the lab because we can't in the lab produce the conditions which are produced in the Thundercloud to get this. So while we still really understand the mechanism for how exactly this works, we now have seen the evidence of what's going on, and now theoreticians are trying to get a better understanding of what physically is happening. Let me go to the phones because a lot of people have so many questions. Let's go to Oregon.

Mike, hi. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi there, Mike. Are you there? I'm here. Go for it. Hello, how are you this morning? Fine.

I live in McGrand and Northeast Oregon, and I'm a lookout for the U.S. Forest Service. And I understand lightning, cloud-to-cloud lightning, and I understand lightning that comes out of the cloud and strikes the ground. The last weekend, we had massive lightning storms that lasted for hours, last Friday and Saturday, including a lot of lightning that came as tent holes from the cloud, the cloud and never struck the ground, and I don't understand that. I don't understand the science behind it because I thought they either struck the cloud

or stayed in the cloud. So if I get an explanation for that, I would appreciate it. All right, Bill. Bill, can you fill us in on what is the difference between cloud to cloud lightning and cloud to ground lightning? There's really no difference in terms of the actual physical mechanism. basically lightning tries to go from one region of charge to another region of charge. And that charge can either be inside the cloud or it can be in the ground, and lightning finds the easiest way to get from one point to the other. So if the easiest point is from one charge region of the cloud to another charge reading of the cloud,

it will stay entirely within a cloud. It can go from one cloud to another cloud. It can go from the cloud outside of the cloud and die before it goes anywhere. else or it can go from the cloud to the ground or it can go from the cloud up into the ionosphere. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about lightning today, our number 8447248255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI. Amy Nordrum, news editor at the I-Triple-E Spectrum, who loves lightning herself, is here to join me. Yeah, I actually used to be terrified of thunderstorms when I was growing up. I was always really scared of him and run into my

parents' room and sleep there whenever they happened, and I'm mostly over that now, but I'm totally fascinated by it. As of Farhad, we were speaking a little bit about the different types of lightning that can occur. I know upward lightning is the most common type of lightning that happens actually at Santa's Tower where you're doing your work. So tell us a little bit about that and what some of the other ways are that scientists classify lightning. Exactly. So most of the lightning flashes actually occur within the cloud. And I mean, we believe like maybe 75% of lightning discharges occur within the cloud or in between the clouds. And about 25% they terminate their path to ground.

And these are called cloud-to-ground lightning. And cloud-to-ground lightning, they can be classified in terms of their direction of propagation and also in terms of the charge that they are carrying. to the ground. So they can be downward negative or positive. So that means that they initiate from inside the cloud and then move towards the ground and they carry either negative or positive charges. So actually it happens that about 90% of cloud to ground flashes are downward negative, probably because the lower part of the founder cloud is charged negatively. so there is more chance that this type of lighting is more likely to occur.

And about 10% of cloud-to-ground lighting flashes are downward positive. Does that mean it starts on the ground and goes upwards? Actually, we can. So both these downward, I mean, downward negative and positive, they start in the cloud and go down. And one can see actually when you look at the lighting, discharge, you can see the direction, whether upward or downward, by looking at the direction of the branches.

Now if you look on images of lightning or the next time you are in the middle of a thunderstorm, you will see that most of the lighting flashes, I mean the direction of the branches are downward. And this indicate that most of the lighting flashes are downward, except when you have very tall structures. So when you have very tall structures, then you can have very tall structures. you can have, let's say, an upside-down lightning or an upward lighting, in the sense that lighting is initiated from the ground

and developing upward. And this is called upward lighting, and it is only produced from the tip of tall objects, typically 100 meters or taller. So for instance, in New York, where you are, so most of the lighting discharges to Empire State buildings or other tall buildings are upward flashes. or if you look at other pictures of lighting

to some tall structures like, I don't know, Eiffel Tower in Paris or Cien Tower in Toronto, they are upward flashes. That means that they are initiated from the structure itself. And this is a quite new type of lighting. I think maybe 150 years ago when there was no tall structures, probably there were no or very little upward lightning discharge. And this is quite interesting. because of course now we have a lot of tall structures and one particular type of tall structures

is wind turbines which are becoming taller and taller and so and we know that one of the main causes of damage of wind turbines are lightning strikes and this is due to of course downward lighting so they attract I mean some of the downward lightings are terrible terminate onto one of the blades of wind turbines, but also, and most of the lightning flashes to the wind turbines are actually upward lightning that is initiated by the turbine itself. All right. We're going to come back and talk lots more about lightning with our guests. 844-724-8255.

You can tweet us at SciFri. We'll be right back after this break. Don't go away. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about the wonder and mystery of lightning. how it's both powerful and unpredictable. And, you know, it claims the lives of more than 2,000 people around the world every year,

not to mention the property damage. With me is ICCLE Spectrum news editor Amy Nordrum, who's been reporting on new strides in lightning research this year, how researchers are getting closer to understanding lightning's origins, and predicting lightning strikes. We've been talking this hour with Bill Rice and Professor of Electrical Engineering and New Mexico Tech in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who's had to leave us this hour.

And Dr. Varhard Roshiti, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Lightning Research in Luzon, Switzerland. When we left, you were talking, you just got in an idea about wind turbines and how the lightning travels up from the turbine blades up into the sky. Right, absolutely. Wow. So does that mean they are in danger? If we go into a wind turbine society, we are in danger of losing them, or do they have protection on them? They have protection on them, but it is becoming a challenging problem to protect them. Because actually until maybe 10 years ago, in order to design, let's say, an efficient lighting protection system,

basically what people do, they look at the light lightning incidents in the region the wind turbines are to be erected. And they look for instance at that region and they see that, okay, the statistics show that there are maybe three, four lightning flashes per square kilometer there. But the problem is that once the wind turbines are erected, these turbines which should have been struck by lightning once a year or once every two or three years, they are struck by lightning 10, 20, 30 times a year. And this is because they are initiating this upward lightning. That is amazing. And so we have to find a way then of protecting these turbines better.

Absolutely, absolutely. And especially considering the fact that upward lighting flashes, they are characterized by different characteristics. Their electric current has different characteristics compared to downward flashes. And sometimes the lightning protection system is designed based on a characteristic of downward. of downward fascist. That's interesting. We have a lot of calls.

I want to get to them before we run out of time. Don't mean interrupt, but there's so many people. First of all, let me go to calls that we've gotten during the week here. Here is a question from Stephen in Sacramento. I was wondering if we could harvest lightning for energy like we do for wind and solar. And that is a common question we are getting today. Could we harvest electricity? Actually, not really.

Actually, lightning is not a very interesting source of energy. Actually, there's lots of energy in a lightning discharge. So each cloud-to-ground lightning involves an energy of more than 1 billion of a jewel. But there are two problems that we face in order to use this energy. First of all, of course, there are lots of lighting discharges. over the earth. So we think that there is about 50 to 100 flashes to ground per second over the planet. So if we were able to capture all these lightning flashes, which is, of course, an impossible thing to do,

but assuming that we could capture all these flashes, this would correspond to a maximum power available, which is quite significant. But there is another problem, is that most of this energy, is converted to thunder, to hot air, to radio waves. And there is only a very small fraction which is available at the channel base. So the electrical energy that we could store and we could capture and store at the base of the channel is quite a small fraction of energy.

And I think the total energy in a single flash, assuming it could be captured, would only operate a single light bulb, for a few months or so. So it is not a very good and efficient, you know, way of harvesting lightning energy. Farhad, I know you have big plans next year to start triggering lightning, actually,

up at Santa's Tower and the Swiss Alps at your lightning research facility. So how do you plan to do that? And, you know, why do you want to do it? Why are you interested in doing that? Yeah, absolutely. So perhaps I can say a few things about triggering lightning. So actually one of the main challenges of lightning research is to obtain experimental data

because of the random nature of lightning and the fact that inside high voltage laboratory, we cannot really reproduce lightning as Bill was saying. So we need to do experiment on real lightning. And there are different ways of obtaining data on lightning. One is the use of towers, told towers which are struck by lightning often. And so that's what we do. Another technique that has been used for decades

is the artificial initiation of lighting using rockets. And this has been used for research purposes. So basically, this technique is based on firing of a small rocket, which trails a grounded wire. So we offer a preferential path to the lightning. So of course we have to launch the rocket when the electric field that ground is sufficiently high so that there is a good chance of triggering a lightning.

So you're doing Ben Franklin's experiment over again just with a rocket instead of a kite? Absolutely. So we make that the light in discharge goes to a specific point in the ground, at which we have some sensors to measure lighting current, and we have lots of other equipment around to measure other things.

So this is a way, yeah. And I want to, I want to, I want to bring in another guest to talk about predicting lightning, because while we can't yet predict lightning, we can detect it when it happens all over the world, including in the Arctic, is not a common occurrence, but something that has happened repeatedly this last Saturday. I want to bring on one of the people responsible

for monitoring lightning flashes around the world. That is Dr. Ryan Saeed. He is a research scientist and electrical engineering for the Finnish company, Vizola, which runs the global lightning detection network. Welcome to Science Friday. Happy to be here, thank you. So you help and maintain two big lightning detection networks,

one for the U.S., one that covers the whole world. What is the point of that? Yeah, so we continuously monitor lightning all over the world, and as Farahad was saying, there's a lot of lightning to monitor, 50 to 100 flashes every single second. And we do this by using, using networks of GPS synchronized radio receivers.

As far out was saying, each lightning flash has a lot of electrical currents, and they essentially act as broadcast antennas in the sky. And then we measure the radio waves that they admit at these remote sensors to locate where the lightning is. And like Ira was saying, lightning was detected in the Arctic this last weekend, and I understand your network was involved. How common is that? Yeah, the conditions for lightning in the Arctic are fairly unusual.

You need warm, moist air and some vertical instability, and that's much more common over the tropics or in mid-latitudes during the local summer. That said, each summer we typically detect a few thunderstorms in the Arctic region, but this one is really notable from the standpoint of how many flashes we detected. In fact, the global network saw over 600 lightning events

within 600 miles of the North Pole, and that's over three times as many events as we've seen in any previous storm in that region. Although, to be fair, we only have records going back to 2012. Let's go to the phones to Massachusetts. Hi, Michael. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, hello. How are you?

Hi, there. Go ahead. So, yeah, one of my favorite stories from my dad, it was a Navy pilot, is he was hit off of Lockerbie, Scotland, by Lightning. Lightning actually entered the air, aircraft and propagated on the inside of a ball or the lightning or plasma and then exited. How common is this? You guys ever heard of that before?

Wow. Yeah. So ball lightning is a really interesting anecdotal phenomenon. It's usually characterized by some luminous ball, which is usually associated with a nearby thunderstorm. But interestingly, this hasn't been, or this phenomenon hasn't been reproduced in a controlled experiment. So it's still an outstanding question, the lightning community. Well, let me ask both of you. So it's not, it's safe if lightning hits a plane.

We should not be worried if we're in an airplane. Farad, by lightning striking it? Well, in principle, I think airplanes are well protected against lightning. And what is interesting is that every commercial airplane is on average struck by lightning once a year. And again, as for the case of, you know, tall structures, initiate their own lightning, most of these lightning flashes that strike airplanes are initiated from the airplane itself. That is you can see that, I mean from the airplane up you have branches which are towards the sky and from the airplane down the branches are

towards the ground which indicate that the point of initiation of lighting was the airplane itself. Now the traditional airplanes which are made. essentially of metal, they are very well protected against lightning. We know that metallic enclosures typically protect everything which is inside from the outside electromagnetic disturbance, whatever that could be. But today we are using more and more composite material. And because of that, the protection of, let's say, modern aircraft is becoming more and more complex and challenging.

Wow, that's a very interesting thing to learn. And then, Ryan, I know lately you've been working on trying to measure another particular type of lightning called hot lightning for the first time. So what is that? Yeah, the first thing to know about hot lightning is not actually any hotter than normal types of lightning, but it's called that because of its capacity to heat up an object that is struck. So a lightning flash to the ground consists of multiple current surges.

They're called return strokes. They're very powerful, but they are very short. They last for less than about 1,000th of a second. And the difference with hot lightning is it has something called a continuous current that continues to flow for 10 to 100 times longer. And it's this sustained current that causes the extra heating. And actually, this can cause more likely to cause forest fires or maybe damage a wind turbine blade to bring in a topic from earlier.

And the problem is our ground-based networks aren't able to determine. this continuing current. We can just tell where the impulsive part struck the ground. But now there is a new weather satellite that was recently launched that has a new lightning sensor that is able to detect these continuing currents. So this is really a game-changing opportunity for us where now not only can we tell where the lightning struck the ground, but we can identify those that pose more of a hazard from the perspective of heating. I'm Ariflato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We have a cut from Richard from Madison, Wisconsin, who sent us a story on our Science Friday Vox Pop app about a close call with lightning. The craziest lightning I've ever seen, or I should say, felt struck me while I was holding an umbrella in a wide open parking lot.

I felt some tug on the umbrella like static electricity, and it pulled me in the umbrella up, and then, The next thing I knew I heard a very loud blam. I was on the ground, and there was a woman about 50 yards from me screaming, are you okay? Are you okay? Wow. Ryan, is that common? How fearful should people be?

I mean, holding an umbrella in a parking lot during a lightning storm? Not a great idea. Yeah, lightning is very dangerous and very high electro currents and voltages involved. And most injuries happen not. from direct lightning strikes, but from a lightning strike nearby. And that's because as the lightning channel starts to make its way towards Earth, when it's about 50 yards up or so, you can have these upward leaders that come up to meet it. And so there can be a pretty wide area where you have these electrical sparks coming up from the ground that can be quite dangerous as well.

So that might have been what was happening in this case. And Farhad, can you tell us a little about how lightning manifests in different kinds of weather Like, you know, you think about heat lightning or you hear about thunderstorm. What's going on there? Yeah, you can have, I mean, generally lightning occurs within the thunderstorm, but you can have also lightning occurring in other conditions. For example, in volcano clouds. So you see, I mean, I think everybody has seen images of lightning discharge over different types of volcano eruption.

It can also occur in a sandstorm. So there are many observations. So the same phenomenon that leads to the separation of charge in a thunder cloud, similar phenomena can occur within a sandstorm and produce some lightning or lightning-like discharges. And what is also interesting is that lightning is not a only terrestrial phenomenon. It has been observed also on other planets. So we have optical and radio noise data that have been, I would say, interpreted to indicate that there are lightning discharges on different planets of the solar system, at least on Venus, Jupiter, I guess, also on Saturn. So it can occur in different conditions, but of course the main condition is related to thunderstorm.

So. And Ryan, how does a lightning rod protect you? I mean, how do we get protected? And does it offer a cone of protection around us? Yeah, so as I was mentioning earlier, the lightning channel that's coming to the ground is going to make a contact somewhere. So the point of a lightning rod is it encourages attachment to the lightning rod itself, and then that is safely connected through some conducting mesh down to the ground. So if you have a lightning discharge that's going to happen nearby, it helps move that dangerous current in a safe path down to the ground and hopefully not strike another part of your structure and cause more damage. Wow, so many questions, so little time. Thank you all for joining us today, especially Amy Nordrum, news editor at the ICCLEE Spectrum. Thanks, I'm glad you're appreciating thunderstorms now. I know, me too.

That's great. Farad Rashidi, lightning researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Ryan and Saeed, research scientist for Vaisalah, and thank you all for joining us today. Just a reminder, it's the last week of our book club, and we are reading Jennifer Ackerman's The Genius of Birds. Catch up on all the great discussions we've been having at Science Friday.com slash book club. And if you're curious about crows, are you raring for Ravens or just crazy for all the members of the Corvid family? Cy-Fri friend, or DeKali Swift answered questions about funerals, grudges, other crow families, on Reddit this week. Check out ScienceFriety.com slash crows for highlights.

Charles Berkowitz, as our director, senior producer is Christopher Venthaliata. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. Today we had production help from Lucy Wong. Our intern is Camille Peterson. And we had technical engineering help from Rich Kim, Kevin Wolfe. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music. And, of course, we are active all week long on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and all kinds of great stuff about lightning up on a lot.

our website at Science Friday.com. If you want to read an old kid's book about lightning, you could read about the kite that saved a revolution.

Isaac Asimov wrote about how his kite experiments, Ben Franklin's kite experiments, helped get us help from France. I'm Ira Flato

in New York.