This somehow reminds me of the fact that you can produce (surprisingly high-quality) x-rays by unrolling scotch tape in a vacuum chamber[0][1]. I wonder if it turns out to be related in any way. Thunderstorms aren't a vacuum of course, but I dunno, maybe all that frozen hail being thrown around can bumping into each other still involves a similar underlying mechanism somewhere.
Andrew Hall has hypothesized that plasma flow has a large part to play in thunderstorm formation and tornados. These surprising gamma rays mentioned in the article would seem to support Hall's hypothesis.
Hall's theories are well outside of the mainstream and I don't know his credentials, if any, and cannot speak to his hypothesis's veracity. I'm not a scientist. Would any actual scientists care to comment?
Here is a video where he explains his theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU706V0bltc
Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end.
Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc.
Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.
Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...
> Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.
This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a small part of the Web.
Yesterday I considered writing a web scraper completely from scratch (just sockets). Without HTTPS, this is trivial. Of course, you lose out on much (most?) of the web, but I have a feeling most small / interesting sites would still be accessible.
I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would consider high quality enough to use as the basis for the future governors of mankind!)
The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40 millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions of dollars".
This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands.
My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.
In a local publication I follow they always round up or down to make the article easier to read. Sometimes they'll prefix the number with an "about" or "roughly" or "nearly" or whatever.
The actual number (if it's available as a fact) will be printed in the article somewhere, but headings, pull quotes and other call-outs will have some rounded number.
For example, recent article's first paragraph:
"Justice Minister Thembi Simelane took a loan of more than half a million rand from a company that brokered unlawful investments into VBS Mutual Bank by the Polokwane Municipality while she was mayor of the city in 2016. Pauli van Wyk explains what happened."
Further down in the article the "half a million rand" is revealed to be R575,600
> My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong.
It's also often used to make things seem better or worse than they actually are. "Thousands of dollars" sounds like it's far more than for example $2,108.
Only a fabrication if it can't be sourced; otherwise, a source was wrong and you run a correction. When you don't have a number you're willing to point to even that far, that's when you leave it out entirely.
> If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied
That’s not what lying is. To tell a lie is to intentionally state as fact something you know to be false.
Being wrong isn’t lying.
What about being so negligent in checking your facts that any reasonable person would know they’re wrong, but continuing forward anyway?
That's as strong as 175,000 electric eels!
The proper units for electric field would be voltage per unit length. Fortunately an electric eel has both a voltage and a length, so it could be eels per eel.
Thus we have proved that the electric field is dimensionless
what about the eelectric field?
Solid gold comment
poorly conducted
Connected in series, obviously.
Not paralleel?
You might enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywaTX-nLm6Y
There might be quite a difference depending on whether connected in serieel or paralleel I suppose.
Familiarity with the unit is important to gauge scale.
But familiarity gets more remote as you need larger and larger (or, smaller and smaller) multipliers. It's far more illustrative to say "the volume of a typical gas tank" than "the internal volume of hundred million poppy seeds", even though the volumes are in the same ballpark. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(voltage) says that high voltage substations are in 100 kV range and 25.5MV is "The largest man-made DC voltage – produced in a Van de Graaff generator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory" and gives me much better color than a "comparison" with 100 million batteries. (By the way, 100 million batteries stacked together is a bit over the length of one marathon - how many readers could easily tell you that just from the description alone? Much better to measure many lengths in marathons than 10^8's of battery lengths!)
That's fair but the average person kinda knows how much (work/light/heat) a single AA battery can do/produce, but not what a substation can do.
I would posit that no person on earth has personal experience of 100 million AA batteries in a single circuit.
How many have personal experience with 150 MV?
Approximately the same but now you at least use units that make sense.
Can you convert that to marathons per fortnight for me?
It's about 102 kiloTesla marathons squared per forthnight. Dimensions are weird.
Well, now I have a goal!
However voltage does not tell you how much work a battery can produce.
*Release
It releases energy, and energy performs work. The OP however wrote produce.
They need to write for an (average) 6th grade reading level - maximum. So think 4th grade most of the time.
How many 4th graders have any clue what a mega volt is? How many do you think have personal experience with 150 mega volts?
True, but at least get the units right.
A "stack of AA batteries" as described would be a measure of electrical potential (i.e. voltage), not electric field strength (Volts / unit-length in the applicable dimension(s)).
It's been known for quite some time that high density static electric field "break-downs" generate electromagnetic radiation all throughout the spectrum--look at any wide-band antenna's reception next to any spark-gap generator. It doesn't take much--even the piezoelectric igniter on a grill wand will do it.
One can also generate X-rays by rapidly unrolling Scotch tape. It the same phenomena on a _much_ smaller scale. What's "new" here are the two distinct types of gamma discharges indicating (likely) very different field breakdowns--not that these gamma rays themselves are being produced.
Why use AA batteries? It's so hard to zap yourself with them. At least with a 9V battery you can lick it to get a sense of how much power is in them. Not that you could extrapolate that other than to get the sense that the electric field of the storm could vaporize you!
I agree in giving flak for using the term AA batteries in this context.
They could've made it easier for laymen and laywomen to grok if they simply would've defined the volume of batteries in terms of how many Olympic-sized swimming pools one could fill with all those batteries.
Subtly played!
Shots fired!
One form is stating hey, scientific fact that the audience may or may not understand. The other form uses language the audience understands specifically to build up their knowledge. Reducing their confusion also helps them enjoy the article.
So, the journalist are optimizing their writing style For the majority of people to understand and enjoy the writing. That’s probably the best way to write.
Popular U.S. culture is too backwards to know what an SI unit even is. They only use units from 300 years ago, when the Volt wasn't even discovered yet.
Volt wasn't discovered but AA batteries were.
AA batteries were invented, not discovered.
If all of those 100M AA batteries were laid out flat, they would cover over 13 football fields (70000 sq m), including the Chargers home stadium.
Thus we arrive at a new unit: electric-football-fields
Square meters yet surely you mean American football here. Further confusion ensues.
I don’t know what readers are aware of this. American football fields are all the same size, but soccer fields can vary.
That little bit of trivia makes this extra funny. For me anyway.
> American football fields are all the same size
American American football fields are all the same size. But American Canadian football fields are all the same, different, size. And American Arena football fields are also all the same, different, size.
How heavy do you think they’d be in elephants and/or Volkswagen beetles (up to you to pick 70’s era or newer).
How many tesla superchargers is that?
Nobody outside of the industry knows how much a megavolt is.
Megavolts are actually the obscure unit, for normal people.
Most people don't even really understand "million" and "billion" other than as "a lot".
How many libraries of Congress could you light with that power?
The media seems to do this in an attempt to make the concept relatable.. maybe
“Americans will use anything but the metric system”
while the field is strong, the actual energy seems to be not much - a lightning bolt is few billions of Joules, i.e. about 1000 KW/h (100kg gasoline).
kWh
Well, 100kg of gas along with a similar ammount of oxygen. Even then, burning through 100kg of gasoline in the few microseconds of a lighting bolt would probably be more powerful than any non-nuclear bomb ever dropped.
I assume they wanted a way to make it sound massive when it’s really not. Like, that’s about enough to run the average American household for 10 years, but we have power plants that supply multiples of that daily.
A voltage is not a unit of power.
I wonder if this is in any way responsible for the increased biodiversity there - maybe a slightly higher mutation rate?
If you dropped a thing through a storm to the water, would it charge the thing, from gamma radiation?
TIL carbon nano yarn absorbs electricity, probably from storm clouds too.
What are the volt and charge observations for lightning from large tropical thunderstorms?
(And why is it dangerous to attract arc discharge toward a local attractor? And what sort of supercapacitors and anodes can handle charge from a lightning bolt? Lightning!)
Tardigrades can handle Gamma radiation.
"Researchers create new type of composite material for shielding against neutron and gamma radiation" (2024) https://phys.org/news/2024-05-composite-material-shielding-n... :
"Sm2O3 micron plates/B4C/HDPE composites containing high specific surface area fillers for neutron and gamma-ray complex radiation shielding" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02663...
Does this help to explain the genetic diversity of the tropical latitudes; is the genetic mutation rate higher in the presence of gamma radiation?
So many of our plants and flowers (here in North America) originate from rainforests and tropical latitudes, but survive at current temps for northern latitudes.
No, insignificant Is diverse because there is more biomass
No, insignificant
So the fictional radiation storms in Fallout 4 are kinda spot on.
Stole Bruce Banner’s thunder
the tropical part obviously explains Street Fighter II's Blanka resemblance to the Hulk.
the phenomenon of "red sprites", massive discharges of electricity upwards into the ionosphere that counter every single lightning strike, are only now being observed and photographed.
these energy ejections are SO powerful, they temporarily cause miniature aurora displays for a split second, by ionizing the same layer of the atmosphere where they appear. it's amazing to see photos of it.
Here's an article with some pictures in case anyone else was curious about red sprites like I was.
https://earthsky.org/earth/definition-what-are-lightning-spr...
that shot with them aligned up with Milky Way is spectacular
The sheer amount of energy trapped in our skies. It sounds philosophically