Noxious Lightning

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The worldwide distribution of lightning strikes. Each flash produces a tiny puff of NOx individually negligible but adding up to as much as 20 trillion grams per year when summed over the entire globe. Credit: NASA
The worldwide distribution of lightning strikes. Each flash produces a tiny puff of NOx, individually negligible, but adding up to as much as 20 trillion grams per year when summed over the entire globe. Credit: NASA

Lightning is more than light and noise: It's an intense chemical factory that affects both local air quality and global climate. But how big is the effect? Researchers aren't sure. To answer the question they're developing a new technique to estimate the factory's output.


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All News summaries for April 30, 2007

Paying to save tropical forests could be a way to reduce global carbon emissions

7 hours ago | User rating: not rated yet
Wealthy nations willing to collectively spend about $1 billion annually could prevent the emission of roughly half a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year for the next 25 years, new research suggests.

Phoenix Completes Longest Work Shift

9 hours ago | User rating: not rated yet
(PhysOrg.com) -- Phoenix early Tuesday finished its longest work shift of the mission. The lander stayed awake for 33 hours, completing tasks that included rasping and scraping by the robotic arm, in addition ...

Ancient Galactic Magnetic Fields Stronger than Expected

9 hours ago | User rating: not rated yet
(PhysOrg.com) -- Mining the far reaches of the universe for clues about its past, a team of scientists including Philipp Kronberg of Los Alamos National Laboratory has proposed that magnetic fields of ancient galaxies like ...

Polarizing filter allows astronomers to see disks surrounding black holes

10 hours ago | User rating: not rated yet
(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, a team of international researchers has found a way to view the accretion disks surrounding black holes and verify that their true electromagnetic spectra match what astronomers ...

Category 2 Hurricane Dolly Crosses South Padre Island, Texas

10 hours ago | User rating: not rated yet
At 12:00 p.m. CDT (1:00 p.m. EDT) Dolly's eye was located near latitude 26.2 north and longitude 97.0 west or about 35 miles northeast of Brownsville, Texas, and she was crossing South Padre Island.

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