Man beaten by nature, once again

I found this interesting article today on Science Daily showing proof that lightning, in the right conditions, creates small particle accelerators in the upper atmosphere that have the energy of a small nuclear plant. There are several other phenomena associated with lightning and electricity that we know little about, like ball lightning, sprites, blue jets and bead lightning.
It was theorized back in 1925 that these high energy particle beams occurred, and it appears they do. Mother nature seems to cause this on merely on accident, or maybe just for the hell of it. We (everyone involved) spent almost 4.5 billion dollars on the LHC at Cern alone, and the first time they tried it, it broke the machine. There are 78 of these in the world currently, of varying sizes.
Man has been struggling to understand the universe for centuries, if not millenia. Lightning still remains relatively poorly understood, despite its common occurrence. It's also really cool to watch, especially in slow motion. This just goes to show us that we still have so much to learn about the forces in nature, even things that occur around us every day.