14th November before noon
Today Adam and the team are at Brighton University making more lightning in the High Voltage testing labs. By the end of the day Jem and Chris from the Science Shack team hope to have knocked up a proper Faraday Cage for Adam to step inside before being zapped with a million volts of electricity.

10am
Dr Peter Howson, who runs the Brighton High Voltage labs, shifts a lever, flicks a switch, presses a button and strikes a Silver Birch tree with thousands of volts - simulating a lightning bolt. The sap in the tree instantly boils, explosively, splitting the trunk. Earlier he showed us what happened to a piece of dry wood - virtually nothing.

Peter is more familiar with zapping insulating materials, known as 'dielectrics'. He is assisted by PhD student Nigel Bish. Together they appear to have discovered a new way of predicting whether dielectrics are showing signs of premature ageing or degradation - which means their invention will help predict faults in materials subject to high voltage more accurately than ever before.

'They used to rely on 'seasoned opinion' to predict these things' says Nigel. The system he is working on uses neural networks to predict 'underlying trends' in ageing or degradation of materials. He tests out his system by deliberately instigating voids (or faults in this context) into the materials he tests. Fuzzy logic and neural networks - invented as a result of studies on how the human brain looks at the world - are for Nigel's purposes the best way of judging those 'underlying trends.

He is pretty sure that they now have a foolproof way of fault detection and fault predicting in dialectrics. Any drillion dollar companies out there who want a piece of the action?

Nigel has also discovered in the course of his work that high voltage physicists, motorbikes, rock music and guitar lovers, tend to hang out together. This might explain all those Tesla blue flames fizzing around rock guitarists' guitars.

11.30am
Dr Howson zaps a (busted) computer monitor with an arc of electricity. An arc gives a much bigger jolt as it is constant and powerful and eventually sets fire to things. But it is the very suddenness of the lightning bolt that makes it so dangerous.

'More power Igor!' Dr Howson says to Nigel as he zaps a telephone and the charge runs up the flex and out of the ear piece. Ever since the Science Shack team contacted the good Doctor he has kindly been doing tests in preparation for today's filming. His workshop is littered with stuffed toys, old TV monitors and bits of tree.

He has since discovered a passion for blowing things up with lightning he never knew was in him. His students were no less enthusiastic. 'They were so fascinated by seeing things being blown up and roasted and they didn't want to go back to their lectures' he says, smiling.

There is (believe it or not) a serious side to this demonstration. You are pretty safe inside a house during lightning but Dr H does not advise talking on the phone, as the flex is very attractive to lightning. And your TV or computer - even when it is switched off - might blow up after conducting the lightning through the cable or the lead.

12noon
Dr Howson can't resist one more test and zaps a cuddly toy donated by a student who no longer had a use for it.

He then explains to Adam things to avoid in a thunderstorm:

• Don't stand in an open field, especially not while swinging a golf club.
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• You are safer standing on one leg than with your legs apart. Scientists have observed that lightning can run up one leg and down the other. Nasty. Cows near trees have suffered this fate.
• If you are swimming in the sea or a lake you should be perfectly safe. There is a huge dissipation of electricity in an expanse of water (this might explain why fish don't end up being killed 'en masse' every time there is a storm). 'You'd be immersed in a vast Earth' he explains'.
• Don't go outside, but...
•  ...avoid telephones and computers indoors.
• Finally, it is not a good idea to go out onto the Common wearing one of those First World War German helmets with a spike on top. While there is still something of a debate raging in academic crcles about the merits of spikes and domes in conducting electricity, Dr Howson says the spike is more attractive.

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