Earthquake Hazards Program could have new leadership

Izmit Earthquake on Seismic Hazards in Istanbul

We calculate the probability of strong shaking in Istanbul—an urban center of 10 million people—from the description of earthquakes on the North Anatolian fault system in the Marmara Sea during the past 500 years, and test the resulting catalog against the frequency of damage in Istanbul during the preceding millennium. Departing from current practice, we include the time-dependent effect of st...

Earthquake hazards on the cascadia subduction zone.

Large subduction earthquakes on the Cascadia subduction zone pose a potential seismic hazard. Very young oceanic lithosphere (10 million years old) is being subducted beneath North America at a rate of approximately 4 centimeters per year. The Cascadia subduction zone shares many characteristics with subduction zones in southern Chile, southwestern Japan, and Colombia, where comparably young oc...

Could Morality Have

Could plants have cognitive abilities?

Vegetation is traditionally regarded as passive, doing nothing but what is essential to grow and survive. Evidence is accumulating, however, in support of formerly esoteric notions that plants can communicate, remember, even count--features that one would call cognitive if they were observed in animals. Michael Gross reports.

How Could Language Have Evolved?

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary th...