Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates, is surrounded by desert and receives about 10cm of rain a year, so the government has paid scientists to create it. Enter the team from the University of Reading who have used drones to zap clouds with electricity, which then causes water droplets to clump together, which then fall on the ground rather than evaporating mid-air, as they tend to do in the sweltering country. Costing more than $2 million, it’s cheaper than other strategies to get more of the wet stuff, including desalination technology, pipelines, building a mountain and even floating an iceberg down from the Arctic. That would take quite a tugboat…

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