EARTH: Shake, rattle and roll

What does an earthquake sound like?

2012-08-08

(Press-News.org) Alexandria, VA – A team of researchers may have discovered a way to hear earthquakes. Not the noises of rattling windows and crumbling buildings, but the real sounds an earthquake makes deep underground as rock grinds and fails catastrophically. Typical seismic waves have frequencies below the audible range for humans, but the August issue of EARTH shows you where to find the voice of one seismic monster: the March 11, 2011, magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake in Japan.

Beyond the novelty of simply hearing an earthquake, the team found that the new technology could possibly lead to breakthroughs in other areas of seismology. How did this group manage to capture the sounds of an earthquake, and what other applications could this technology have?

###Read this story and more in the August issue of EARTH Magazine, available online at http://www.earthmagazine.org. Learn why Lake Erie has it all backward; discover if exoplanets exchange material with meteors; and find out why lahars don't follow traditional hazard models, all in this month's issue of EARTH.

Keep up to date with the latest happenings in Earth, energy and environment news with EARTH magazine online at http://www.earthmagazine.org. Published by the American Geosciences Institute, EARTH is your source for the science behind the headlines.

The American Geosciences Institute is a nonprofit federation of geoscientific and professional associations that represents more than 250,000 geologists, geophysicists and other earth scientists. Founded in 1948, AGI provides information services to geoscientists, serves as a voice of shared interests in the profession, plays a major role in strengthening geoscience education, and strives to increase public awareness of the vital role the geosciences play in society's use of resources, resiliency to natural hazards, and interaction with the environment.

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UK hotel industry alive with innovation

2012-08-08

Large hotel chains are quick to adopt and adapt innovations developed in other industries, while smaller hotels make almost continual incremental changes in response to customers' needs. The UK hotel industry is alive with innovation and new ways of improving service for customers, research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has found. The findings of a project led by Professor Gareth Shaw of Exeter University and Professor Allan Williams of Surrey University run counter to the traditional image of the hotel sector as slow to change. Official measures ...

Unusual weather events identified during the Black Saturday bushfires

2012-08-08

Research has revealed that the extremely hot, dry and windy conditions on Black Saturday combined with structures in the atmosphere called 'horizontal convective rolls' -similar to streamers of wind flowing through the air - which likely affected fire behaviour. The study is the first of its kind to produce such detailed, high-resolution simulations of weather patterns on the day and provides insights for future fire management and warning systems. The work was led by Dr Todd Lane and Ms Chermelle Engel from The University of Melbourne with Prof Michael Reeder (Monash ...

Benefit of PET and PET/CT in ovarian cancer is not proven

2012-08-08

Due to the lack of studies, there is currently no proof that patients with ovarian cancer can benefit from positron emission tomography (PET) alone or in combination with computed tomography (CT). As regards diagnostic accuracy, in certain cases, recurrences can be detected earlier and more accurately with PET or PET/CT than with conventional imaging techniques. This is the conclusion of the final report by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) in Cologne that was published on 23 May 2012. More reliable diagnosis is supposed to improve ...

Queen's University Belfast makes significant cancer breakthrough

2012-08-08

A major breakthrough by scientists at Queen's University Belfast could lead to more effective treatments for throat and cervical cancer. The discovery could see the development of new therapies, which would target the non-cancerous cells surrounding a tumour, as well as treating the tumour itself. Researchers at Queen's Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology have found that the non-cancerous tissue, or 'stroma', surrounding cancers of the throat and cervix, plays an important role in regulating the spread of cancer cells. The discovery opens the door for the development ...

Scientists discover the truth behind Colbert's 'truthiness'

2012-08-08

Trusting research over their guts, scientists in New Zealand and Canada examined the phenomenon Stephen Colbert, comedian and news satirist, calls "truthiness"—the feeling that something is true. In four different experiments they discovered that people believe claims are true, regardless of whether they actually are true, when a decorative photograph appears alongside the claim. The work is published online in the Springer journal, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. "We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos people see every day—the ones that decorate newspaper or TV ...

Humanities mini-courses for doctors sharpen thinking and creativity

2012-08-08

Mini-courses designed to increase creative stimulation and variety in physicians' daily routines can sharpen critical thinking skills, improve job satisfaction and encourage innovative thinking, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers who piloted a series of such courses. "For decades, career development theory has identified a stage that occurs at midlife, characterized by a desire to escape the status quo and pursue new ventures," said Kimberly Myers, Ph.D., associate professor of humanities. "It is increasingly clear that these mid-career professionals ...

Berlin beats London and Washington in league table of world's best democratic space

2012-08-08

New research from the University of Warwick suggests that Berlin has the best democratic space in the world, topping a list that includes London, Washington and Tokyo. The list appears in a new book, 'Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance' written by Dr John Parkinson, from the University of Warwick's Politics and International Studies department. Dr Parkinson carefully selected 11 capital cities and assessed how well they provide space for all kinds of democratic action. He visited Berlin, Washington, Ottawa, Canberra, Wellington, ...

Cichlid fish: How does the swim bladder affect hearing?

2012-08-08

"Sound vibrations are transmitted to the inner ear via anterior extensions of the swim bladder or via bony ossicles", the biologist Tanja Schulz-Mirbach explains how swim bladders may serve for hearing. The hearing sensitivity improves considerably in this way. The anterior part of the swim bladder functions in specialized fish species similar to an ear drum. Up to now the effects of the different swim bladder morphologies have not been investigated in detail in cichlid fishes. The behavioural biologists of the University of Vienna Tanja Schulz-Mirbach and Friedrich Ladich ...

New 3D map of massive galaxies and black holes offers clues to dark matter, dark energy

2012-08-08

Astronomers have constructed the largest-ever three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes, which will help the investigation of the mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up 96 percent of the universe. The map was produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III). Early last year, the SDSS-III released the largest-ever image of the sky, which covered one-third of the night sky. The new data, "Data Release 9" (DR9), which publically releases the data from the first two years of this six-year project, begins expansion of this ...

Feeling fat may make you fat

2012-08-08

They're everywhere -- in magazines, on the Internet, on television—people with super-thin bodies who are presented as having the ideal body form. But despite the increasing pressure to be thin, more and more of us are overweight. Now, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have found that normal weight teens who perceive themselves as fat are more likely to grow up to be fat. "Perceiving themselves as fat even though they are not may actually cause normal weight children to become obese as adults," says Koenraad Cuypers, a researcher ...

EARTH: Shake, rattle and roll

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