Five Labs That Make Going to Class the Best Part of College

Call Lightning from the Heavens

Where: University of Florida Lightning Research Lab

What You'll Learn: That lightning can and will strike the same place many times

Future Job: Building lightning-resistant objects, from cell towers to helicopters

Prospective Employers: Motorola, Sikorsky, Raytheon, Kennedy Space Center

Today's assignment: Catch lightning. Seriously. We're talking millions of volts, shooting straight from a mass of black clouds down to a metal structure 50 yards away from where you're taking notes.

At the Lightning Lab, a group of students and researchers work around the clock all summer to trigger lightning during passing storms. A thin wire attached to a rocket acts as a kind of fuse, coaxing a bolt of lightning down the so-called plasma channel to the grounded metal launcher. There the lab's sensor networks help solve such mysteries as the cause of each stroke's unique electromagnetic field, or how a direct hit will affect underground cables. But triggering lightning is not as easy as it sounds. Lab co-director Vladimir Rakov says the students are lucky if they get 40 strokes of lightning per season, and many of those could happen during the same storm. Five years ago, students in the Lightning Lab helped make one of the decade's biggest discoveries: that most lightning emits x-rays. Today, students are still trying to figure out why by building new x-ray-sensor networks.