"I saw light,” said Horry County, South Carolina resident Romulus McNeill said a few days ago after a lightning bolt just missed him. “I tried to get up out of there like the Roadrunner."

(WSOC-TV) Read the rest

If you're a fan of Kentucky bourbon, get ready to cry: According to a number of reports, 45,000 barrels of Jim Beam just went up in flames.

From The New York Times:

The fire started around 11 p.m. in Woodford County on Tuesday and was still burning at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, fire officials said. They expected the warehouse to burn for five more hours. No injuries were reported.

“The biggest issue we are dealing with is the environmental aspect,” said Drew Chandler, the Woodford County emergency management director. “If we put the fire out, we are going to dump a lot of water on it and that water will be contaminated.”

He said that fire officials did not know what had caused the fire, but a spokeswoman for Jim Beam said she believed lightning had sparked it.

Because of the fear that water in the area around the fire could be contaminated with ethanol if firefighters turned their hoses on it, 'let is burn' was the order of the day. The good news for Jimmy B aficionados is that the barrels that burned were full of relatively young hooch. As such, there shouldn't be any interruption in the amount of the bourbon available to the public for the foreseeable future--the burnt out warehouse is one of many. The bad news is that the lost alcohol was worth a small fortune. According to the New York Times, each barrel contains enough bourbon to fill between 150 and 200 750 milliliter bottles. Read the rest

Lightning hit a Russian Soyuz rocket right after liftoff today. The direct hit resulted in nothing more (and nothing less) than this thrilling video. From Space.com:

The lightning strike occurred during the launch of a Glonass-M navigation satellite from Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome about 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow at 9:23 a.m. Moscow time (0623 GMT). In a statement, officials with Russia's space agency Roscosmos announced that the rocket successfully reached orbit.

"Lightning is not an obstacle for you!" Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter while congratulating the Glonass-M launch team and military Space Forces.

Поздравляем командование Космических войск, боевой расчёт космодрома Плесецк, коллективы РКЦ "Прогресс" (Самара), НПО имени С.А.Лавочкина (Химки) и ИСС имени академика М.Ф.Решетнёва (Железногорск) с успешным запуском КА ГЛОНАСС! Молния вам не помеха pic.twitter.com/1cmlZ4hD1g

— Дмитрий Рогозин (@Rogozin) May 27, 2019

Apple is holding a launch event on Tuesday, October 30, and the image shown on invitations is above. Here's what the smart guesses are on what they're going to announce. Read the rest

During a thunderstorm in #DC today, ##CNN photographer @abdallahcnn captured this great image of lightning striking the #WhiteHouse this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/xnKYTAt8Ti

— Matt Hoye (@mattyhoyeCNN) September 4, 2018

In Transient: Extended and Unused Footage, Dustin Farrell shares some of the great shots of weather events that got trimmed or omitted from his beautiful film Transient. Read the rest

Deep brain stimulators -- pacemaker-like implants that deliver electrical impulses to specific regions in the brain -- are common treatments for Parkinson's and other neurological disorders. It's known that strong electromagnetic fields from the likes of ham radio antennae and arc welders can damage the devices. Now, researchers report the case of a 66-year-old woman whose deep brain stimulator was knocked out when lightning hit her apartment. Fortunately, the lightning shut off the device without damaging her brain.

“The patient was not charging the battery of her IPG (implantable pulse generator) during the event, and the recharger for the IPG was disconnected from the power supply during the storm," the researchers wrote. "The recharger and IPG were therefore not destroyed. The patient realized that something was wrong only 1 hour after the storm subsided, when the dystonic tremor in her neck reappeared.”

"Lightning may pose a danger to patients receiving deep brain stimulation: case report" (Journal of Neuroscience via Mysterious Universe) Read the rest

Filmmaker Dustin Farrell spent his summer traveling 20,000 miles to film lightning around the United States. He used a Phantom Flex4K camera to capture these brilliant bolts at 1,000 frames per second. The film is called "Transient."

“Lightning is like a snowflake. Every bolt is different,” Farrell says. “I learned that lightning varies greatly in speed. There are some incredible looking bolts that I captured that didn’t make the cut because even at 1000fps they only lasted for one frame during playback. I also captured some lightning that appear computer generated it lasted so long on the screen.”

(via The Kid Should See This)

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Yowza! Read the rest

On Monday, Nick Gemayel was seated at his office desk in his Rochester, New York auto repair shop when he saw a bright flash spark from a light switch and heard a loud crack. Then he realized that his hand hurt like hell was blistered. A co-worker reported that he had seen lightning strike the building. It apparently arced from the light switch into Gemayel. Hospital doctors treated and released him. No word yet on what superpowers he may now have.

(Associated Press) Read the rest

Graduate student Jason Ahrns captured a stunning image of red sprites over Nebraska while aboard a plane chartered by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And behold Scott McPartland's rare video of the phenomenon in May. Read the rest

Take that, you wicked telephone pole. (@Alby)

Lightning strike obliterates telegraph pole: pic.twitter.com/8UIsFk3qg3

— Alby (@Alby) July 25, 2016

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In this video from the Florida Institute of Technology, professor Ningyu Liu at the Geospace Physics Laboratory "caught a beautiful lightning show from a recent storm. It’s recorded at 7000 frames per second and the playback speed is 700 frames per second." Read the rest

January 30 was Nick Panayiotou's lucky day. He was standing in a boat shed in Sydney, Australia’s Oyster Bay filming the storm outside when...

(Thanks, UPSO!)

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Wow! Check out this video of lightning striking a tree @BishopTKGorman school here in Tyler Thurs. afternoon. #etxwx pic.twitter.com/TnbUvogUhX

— Cedric Haynes KLTV (@CedricKLTV) January 22, 2016

Meteorologist Cedric Haynes of East Texas station KLTV tweeted this amazing video recorded by a surveillance cam at Bishop Thomas K. Gorman Catholic School in Tyler, Texas.

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Motorists behind the cyclist saw lightning strike his helmet. Dazed, the gentleman pulled over and then rode on to look for assistance.

Via Fox KTPV:

Firefighters said, at that point, he got back on his bike and kept on riding. The man took Exit 76 into Chehalis, where he stopped at a convenience store and asked for help.

I don't think he was going very far. Read the rest

Zeus is pissed. Read the rest