seismic waves

The earliest known attempt at earthquake-proofing dates to the sixth century B.C., when builders in modern-day Iran inserted stone blocks between a structure and its foundation to reduce vibrations. Today’s engineers buffer buildings with metal springs, ball bearings and rubber pads, all designed to sop up the energy from seismic waves. This summer, a team of physicists at the University of Liverpool in England and the French National Centre for Scientific Research tested a different strategy: redirect the waves altogether.

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.

Californians living in fear of the "Big One"—and Californians living in denial about it—should check out these new computer simulations of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Seismologists from the U.S. Geological Survey unveiled these very cool, highly detailed computer simulations that show the seismic waves propagating outward from the epicenter, which lies offshore from San Francisco, and all across the Bay Area. Download the movies here and be sure to watch one of the closeup simulations, say, of downtown San Francisco. According to the USGS Web site, the colors and shading indicate the maximum shaking intensity at each location and the current shaking at the time, noted in seconds on each movie frame. Scary. —Eric Adams