Is there anything Ben Franklin didn't invent? Bifocals, odometers, swim fins, political cartoons, batteries, Franklin stoves and, of course, the first lightning rod were all results of Franklin's ...

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 ...

Last year marked the 270th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod — but it’s more than a relic of history. The Franklin rod remains in use today because the simple design exploits some ...

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 ...

Scientists have found a competitor to the lightning rod — one of the most tried and true methods of controlling where lightning strikes. The new method is far more expensive, but it allowed scientists ...

As we stood before the rich carvings, the bas-relief, and mediæval tracery of an old cathedral in a European city, our eyes wandered upward, beyond the gargoyles, beyond the fretwork, and finally ...

Most of us don’t spend that much time thinking about lightning. Every now and then we hear some miraculous news story about the man who just survived his fourth lightning strike, but aside from that ...

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 ...