Thanksgiving may be the country´s oldest celebration, but that´s no reason to cook with 17th-century tech. Whereas early settlers cooked over open fires, we have smart ovens that automatically adjust to what´s inside them, thermometers that read surface temperature with infrared radiation, knives with molecular structures that keep them sharp longer, and a meat grinder as powerful as a small car engine. Give thanks for technology.

We know this much: Earthquakes strike along faults—fractures in the planet’s crust where plates of rock are thrust into a sort of geological gridlock. The difference between a tremor and an earth-shattering 8.0-plus-magnitude quake depends on whether the plates slip when the tension between them is still relatively low or if they snap after enduring millennia of mounting strain.

Calculating exactly when this might happen, however, is no easy feat.