natural disasters

Los Angelenos have recently watched billowing clouds from a nearby wildfire hover overhead, in scenes reminiscent of "Volcano." NASA's Terra satellite took the opportunity to snap a photo of the smoke monster on the night of August 30. Red outlines in the photo indicate wildfire hotspots.

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Disaster film director Roland Emmerich must be quaking in his boots knowing that his movies may soon have to be a little less destructive. With the invention of an "invisibility cloak" for buildings, earthquake damage could be significantly minimized. Using a series of concentric rings in the foundation of a building, this "cloak" directs seismic waves around a building, rather than destructively against and through it.

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Southern Californians may be living on borrowed time. At least two sections of the notorious San Andreas Fault, a hotbed of tectonic tension, are apparently overdue for a huge earthquake that could devastate Los Angeles County or San Francisco. Though they can neither prevent nor pinpoint it, scientists would like to get as much information as they can as to where and when the next "Big One" could happen. Increasingly, they're turning to air and space to learn what's happening 10 miles underground.

A new radar plane developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the first American system designed to map earthquake hot zones.

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While watching news footage of a wildfire raging, maybe you've been struck by frustration at the lack of a high-tech, super-sized firefighting solution. Why, in 2009, don't firefighters have access to a super water-cannon? Where is the quick-hardening smothering shell? How much longer will we wait for a mountain-climbing hydro-Roomba?

The answer may be closer than you think. I was treated to a demonstration of the largest firefighting vehicle in the world, the Evergreen Supertanker.

Check out the photos.

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This morning, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Belize and Honduras, resulting a few fatalities and some property damage.

Paul Earl, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey, told Popsci.com that the quake emanated from the Swan Island Transform fault, a strike-slip fault not unlike the San Andreas fault in California. Both the location -- 80 miles off shore -- and the type of fault helped minimize the destruction caused by the event.

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Normally, the worst thing one of Germany's wild boars will do is ruin a field of corn, which is one of their favorite foods. Lately, however, as their population has exploded --  scientists estimate that it increased by 320 percent in Germany in the last year alone -- the pigs have been having more and more encounters with humans.

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The tsunami that struck Crescent City, California, on April 25, 1992, wasn't a destructive one -- the waves were relatively small, and no loss of life or significant damage resulted. But it was still an important tsunami event, in that it illustrated how quickly a wave can arrive at nearby coastal communities and how long the at-risk period can last. The tsunami occurred after a 7.1 earthquake shook the coast of Cape Mendocino on California's north coast, generating a series of tsunami waves.

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As a respite from the nonstop flu blogging, I decided it was time to have a little fun and show the lighter side of science.

First up is a story from the Wall Street Journal about the residents of Tuscarora, Nevada, driving off a swarm of insects by blasting Led Zeppelin.

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Emergency response entails a widespread tactical effort by countless government agencies. Too often, citizens are left out of the loop and have to rely on mass media, cell phones, and Web sites for emergency information. Microsoft Vine is a new social networking tool, designed to help its users keep tabs on people and places. Currently in a beta test in Seattle, the service lets you enter a location and see news reports aggregated from 20,000 sources, and from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You can enter people you want to track into Microsoft Vine, and then receive an e-mail, text message, or an update about them in the Vine dashboard -- which runs on Windows only. Disaster victims with Macs are out of luck.

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