Extreme lightning events set records

 Science News, October 2016

Two electrifying light shows were much more than flashes in the pan. A 2007 thunderstorm over Oklahoma produced a lightning flash that stretched more than 321 kilometers horizontally — roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to New York City. In southern France in 2012, a single lightning flash lit up the sky nonstop for 7.74 seconds, enough time for light to make about three round trips from Earth to the moon.

Ocean archaea more vulnerable to deep-sea viruses than bacteria

 Science News, October 2016

Deep-sea viruses aren’t just dealers of disease; they’re crucial players in Earth’s nutrient cycles. In marine sediments, virus assassinations of single-celled life-forms called archaea play a much larger role in carbon and other chemical cycles than previously thought, new research suggests.

Minuscule machines earn trio 2016 chemistry Nobel

 Science News, October 2016

The world’s most minuscule machines operate on the molecular level and have won their creators the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The prize is shared between Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg in France, J. Fraser Stoddart of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and Bernard Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.