Light Brings Rain

Scientists have discovered that shooting high-powered lasers into the sky can create the germ of a rain cloud, opening the door to eco-friendly cloud manipulation. “This is the first time that a laser was used to condense water from both laboratory experiments and from the atmosphere,” says Jérôme Kasparian, a coauthor of the study. To demonstrate this effect, Kasparian and his colleagues shot extremely short pulses of intense light from a high-powered infrared laser into a cloud chamber, at which point the view fogged up immediately.