MIT researchers have proposed a strange new way to predict the severity of a hurricane: Listening underwater. Currently, the most common way to gauge a storm's strength is to either study satellite images (which can be pretty inaccurate), or fly a weather plane straight on into the storm and gather critical data (which gets expensive).

Scientists have been trying to figure out how to stimulate lightning strikes with lasers for several decades, and now a group of European researchers have made an important advance.

The group, led by Jerome Kasparian of the University of Lyon, used laser pulses to trigger electrical activity in thunderclouds passing over New Mexico's South Baldy Peak. By tweaking these laser pulses in the future, Kasparian thinks they should be able to create charged channels of molecules that act like conducting wires, and provide the lightning with a path to the ground.

"Even I could predict the weather better than those guys." That statement, uttered by Managing Editor Jill Shomer on a colder-than-predicted January afternoon, started it all. The mounting conventional wisdom, it seemed to us, was that today's meteorologists couldn't forecast clouds in a rainstorm. Fair? Certainly not, but poor recent forecasting had us questioning the accuracy of 5- and even 3-day forecasts. Could we get the same precision from, say, a dartboard?