Ball lightning

Now that we're finally starting to see some hot weather, it won't be long before we begin to see something else: thunderstorms and lightning (very, very frightening me! Galileo, Galileo…sorry, just a little Queen flashback).

It's the lightning, of course, that makes thunderstorms thunder. If I may quote myself from a previous column, lightning "is a massive but short-lived electrical discharge in the atmosphere, usually several kilometres long.

"Lightning arises because of a charge separation ...