The mystery of the ball lightning has been solved by a team of Brazilian scientists who were able to create lightning balls. The scientists even got the mysterious ball to bounce around for several seconds in a lab. The team who was able to finally recreate this mysterious natural phenomenon is the one led by Antonio Pavao and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco.

It has always been thought that lightning balls were either a "highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields" or "a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface" - with the latter supposedly the result of lightning striking soil and turning the silicon in the soil into silicon vapor. This latter theory attributed the heat of lightning balls to the heat of the silicon recombining with the oxygen in the atmosphere.

Using these theories as a basis for their experiments, the Brazilians took a silicon wafer which is 350 micrometres thick, sandwiched it between two electrodes and then zapped them with currents which go up to 140 amps. They then moved the electrodes slightly apart, and an electrical arc was formed which in turn vaporized the silicon and created ping-pong sized lightning balls which lasted up to eight seconds.

Even though we're not yet sure about the practical use of this experiment (except maybe to dispel the fears of people that the floating orbs they see during thunderstorms may be their great-great-great-aunt), Pavao, Paiva, and their team are now continuing their experiments using various other materials, minerals and alloys, to see if the same effect can be reproduced using those variations. Whether an iPod was one of the things they plan to zap next is unknown.