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When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on YacL.

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science.

I'm Steve Merski.

Besides helping to create the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin, of course, invented

the lightning rod, which sits atop buildings and protects them by attracting lightning strikes

and conducting them to the ground, rather than through the structure, which can cause fires or

outright electrocutions. But what's better, a lightning rod with a round end, or one that comes

to a sharp point? According to the book Revolutionary Science by Steve Jones at University

College London, Franklin liked lightning rods to be, in Franklin's own words, made sharp

as a needle. And so in North America, Jones writes, the use of one or the other was interpreted

as a statement in favor of the rebels or of the crown. In fact, Jones continues, George the third,

to advertise his displeasure at the colonial revolt, had the sharpened

structures on Buckingham Palace replaced with rounded versions. The king even pressured the Royal

Society, the leading scientific organization of the time, and still highly regarded today,

to endorse the idea that round-ended lightning rods were better than Franklin's pointy ones,

to which the president of the Royal Society responded,

I will always do my best to fulfill the wishes of His Majesty, but I am able to change

...