Lightning is pretty. But near airports, it can threaten ground crews, sending them indoors and delaying flights. Around power stations, it can cut the juice to entire cities.
Jean-Pierre Wolf, a physicist at the University of Geneva, says that new long-range lasers can travel for miles and stop electric zingers before they fry stuff. When pointed into a storm, their beams lay down a channel of low-density, ionized molecules and plasma filaments that draws electricity—just like Dr. Evil's tractor beam seizing an asteroid—and this controls the lightning's path.
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