Ball lightning in lab reported // movie clip also

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Original poster: Davetracer@xxxxxxx 

// I don't know how many of you read Slashdot. I found this 
particular blurb rather difficult to get to. I ordinarily would just 
post a link to it, but I am ... very uncertain it would work based 
off prior experience with Slashdot, and I feel this forum would be 
interested. Anyway, I believe that four lines is close enough to 
"Fair Use" to be okay; the rest is from the article itself.  I have 
included the links as text in brackets so if they don't work 
directly, you can just cut and paste them into your browser.//


EWAdams writes to point us to a New Scientist report that the 
mysterious phenomenon of 
<http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325863.500&feedId=online-news_rss20>ball 
lighting has now been created 
[http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325863.500&feedId=online-news_rss20 
] in a Brazilian research lab. The phenomenon has long been reported 
anecdotally but never explained or understood. Scientists have 
devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes 
left over from the Big Bang, but have had little success in producing 
working examples.

From the article: "A more down-to-earth theory... is that ball 
lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in 
the soil into pure silicon vapor. As the vapor cools, the silicon 
condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that 
gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon 
recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... 
took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them 
between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 
amps. Then... they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an 
electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing 
fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of 
ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds." Here is a 
<http://www.espacociencia.pe.gov.br/multimidia.php>movie of the 
phenomenon. 
[http://www.espacociencia.pe.gov.br/multimidia/multimidia_video.php%20 
]   Note: that really IS a trailing space character in there; I don't 
know why it's there.

 -- thanks, Dave