Slashdot Mirror
Ball Lightning Caught On Video and Spectrograph
symbolset writes "Ball lightning has been reported for hundreds of years, and experimentally produced, but for the first time a natural will 'o wisp has been captured on video and amazingly, spectrograph, accidentally by researchers studying ordinary lightning."
It's available here: http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5
Not much to see though.
It's available here: http://physics.aps.org/article...
Not much to see though.
From the link, with my emphasis:
That is what Ping Yuan and co-workers from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, now report. They had set up spectrometers on the remote Qinghai Plateau of northwest China to investigate ordinary lightning, which is frequent in this region. During one late-evening thunderstorm in July 2012, they saw ball lightning appear just after a lightning strike about 900 meters from their apparatus and were able to record a spectrum and high-speed video footage of the ball.
(groan) ... seems there are publications much slower than /. - this was supposed to be news one year and a half ago.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
(groan) ... seems there are publications much slower than /. - this was supposed to be news one year and a half ago.
To be fair, ball lightning sightings and claims to have photographed it or caught it on video are quite frequent, with a very high rate of hoaxes or mistaking other phenomena for it. (Almost as bad as UFO sightings and "evidence.")
It wouldn't surprise me at all if a few extra months were added to the researchers' analysis and to the peer review just to substantiate that this is what it says it is, and all the analysis is correct. Ball lightning is just one of those things that so many people have claimed to see, and it seems odd that scientists have so much trouble catching evidence of natural occurrences... so when you finally think you've got it, you want to be sure.
Not saying it explains the whole delay, but maybe part of it.
It takes a long time to get stuff published. They had to take their results, form a paper, get people to analysis it and then it goes under peer review. For us to have all this information a little over a year out is actually quite good. Also, we know it's gone under review. It could still have bad information in it, but it's less likely.
This actually was ball lightning if you bother reading the article. They just decided to use whatever file photo they could grab when they posted the article but the photo they chose has nothing to do with the actual ball lightning captured on video during a thunderstorm in china. The researchers were originally photographing normal lightning when ball lightning occurred near enough. The actual link to the actual article/video: http://physics.aps.org/article...
A low sperm count?