Lightning rods protect buildings by providing a low-resistance ... This doesn't mean we can randomly call down lightning at will or suck all the risk out of clouds when necessary.

Lightning prefers to travel down a conductive path (which is why lightning rods work in the first place), so a giant laser beam will naturally guide it to the smaller metal rod underneath.

Like a Franklin rod, a lightning bolt would then follow the air channel down the laser path to dissipate safely into the ground. In 2021, Houard, Walch, and colleagues tested their laser lightning ...

But a laser could reach that far, intercepting distant lightning bolts and ushering them down to ground-based metal rods. Houard and his colleagues tested this idea atop the Säntis mountain in ...

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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 ...