More than 90 percent of lightning bolts strike over the continents ... controls the intensity of the flash; something in the cloud.” But the study shows, says Price, that what lies beneath ...

Earth is struck by some 44 bolts of lightning each second ... It is well-established that lightning occurs after clouds build up—and then dramatically release—electrical energy.

That "something else" appears to originate from space.

However, there's also cloud-to-cloud lightning, where bolts dance between clouds, and intra-cloud lightning, which occurs within a single cloud. Then there's cloud-to-air lightning, a less common ...

This is the archetypal lightning bolt, one that arcs out of the sky and smites the ground with a great, often flickering flash of light. Lightning is the sudden release of built-up charge stored ...

including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). The outages were sparked when a bolt of lightning struck a transformer at a power utility ...