Skeptophilia

The cause of lightning has been strangely elusive. Oh, in the broadest-brush terms, we've understood it for a while.  The rapidly-risin...

Something that really grinds my gears is how quick people can be to trumpet their own ignorance, seemingly with pride. I recall being in a s...

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing stuff up. I shar...

One of the most insidious tendencies in human nature is the way we gravitate toward simple answers to complicated questions. I got started t...

If I asked you to name the deadliest single-event natural disaster to strike the western half of the United States in recorded history, what...

Last Sunday (April 14) we had a series of thunderstorms roll through the region, kind of unusual for upstate New York at this time of year. ...

When you think about it, wind is a strange phenomenon. In its simplest form, wind occurs when uneven heating of the surface of the Earth cau...

I've always had a fascination for the weather.  Especially violent weather; if I hadn't become a mild-mannered high school biology t...

Sometimes I bump into a piece of research that's just so cool I have to tell you about it. Yesterday when I was casting about for a topi...

New from the Woo-Woo Bullshit That Would Not Die department, we have: stories popping up all over the place claiming that the discovery of h...