Word: tornadoes
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...twisters apparently struck the Chicago area without warning. Several students were killed in Belvidere as they were boarding buses in a high school parking lot. A number of the dead in Oak Lawn had been out roller skating when the tornado struck...
...connecting the oppositely charged cloud regions, the wire would make a meteorological short circuit. If Rossow's theory is correct, lightning would flash between the regions, vaporizing the wire, equalizing the charge in the regions and robbing the tornado of the energy needed to sustain...
Physicist Vernon Rossow likens a tornado to the rotor of an electrostatic motor, which turns as it transfers electric charges between a positive and a negative electrode. Much the same happens, he theorizes, when a region of positively charged water droplets form near another region of negatively charged droplets in storm clouds...
...test his theory, Rossow passed a mixture of steam and cool air between two oppositely charged wire grids in his laboratory at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. As the cold air condensed the steam into visible droplets, a tiny, 4-in.-high tornado came into view. But when voltage was removed from the grids, the miniature whirlwind promptly died away...
Assuming that a life-sized tornado could also be stopped by equalizing the charge on adjacent regions in storm clouds, Rossow proposes a novel experiment. Fine wire could be wound into a projectile and fired through tornado-spawning clouds. After the projectile leaves the cannon, a parachute-like plate attached to one end of the wire would pop open. It would pull on the wire, causing it to unravel from the speeding projectile...