The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released a draft for soliciting opinions on management of cybersecurity incident reporting on Friday. The draft specifies that the theft of national security information should be recognized as a severe cybersecurity incident, and those who fail to report it as required will be subject to punishment.

According to the CAC, the document is intended to standardize the reporting of cybersecurity incidents and reduce the losses and damage caused by such incidents, so as to safeguard national cybersecurity.

The document clarifies that operators should promptly initiate emergency response plans to deal with network security incidents. Based on the guidelines for the classification of network security incidents, those considered large, severe, or extremely severe incidents should be reported within one hour.

According to the guidelines, if important networks and information systems suffer from particularly severe system losses, resulting in widespread system paralysis and loss of business processing capabilities, it is considered an extremely severe network security incident.

This classification also includes a situation in which state secret information, important sensitive information, and important data is lost or stolen, tampered with or counterfeited, posing a particularly serious threat to national security and social stability.

Other events that pose serious threats to national security, social order, economic development, and public interests are also considered to be extremely severe network security incidents.

Specifically, if provincial-level and above Party and government portal websites or key news websites cannot be accessed for more than 24 hours due to attacks or malfunctions, or if the overall operation of critical information infrastructure is interrupted for more than six hours or the main functions are interrupted for more than 24 hours, it can generally be identified as an extremely severe cybersecurity incident.

If the event affects the work and lives of more than 30 percent of the population in a single provincial-level administrative region, or affects the use of water, electricity, gas, oil, heating, or transportation of more than 10 million people, it also falls into this category.

Additionally, the guidelines specify that if the incident leads to the leakage of personal information of more than 100 million people or causes direct economic losses of more than 100 million yuan ($14 million), it will also be considered an extremely severe cybersecurity incident.

The draft for comment of the document shows that the governance of network security in China has entered an important stage of high-quality development, Qin An, deputy director of the expert committee of counter-terrorism and cyber security governance at the China Society of Police Law, told the Global Times on Friday.

Qin noted that the classification of network security incidents by severity level is a highlight of the document, as it allows for the categorization of incidents based on their urgency and importance. "The classification resolves some of the confusion that may arise during actual implementation," he said.

According to the CAC, if the operator delays reporting, falsely reports, or conceals a cybersecurity incident, resulting in significant harmful consequences, the operator and relevant responsible individuals shall be severely punished according to the law.

"The implementation of relevant punitive measures is crucial to ensure the effective enforcement of laws and to safeguard national security," the expert said.

According to the CAC, when encountering a cybersecurity incident, an operator should report the name of the unit where the incident happens and basic information about the facilities, systems, and platforms involved, as well as the time, location, type of event, and the impact and harm caused.

Additionally, the document states that the report should include the measures that have been taken and their effectiveness, the development trend of the situation, potential further impact and harm, and preliminary analysis of the causes of the incident.

With the name Temple of Heaven, an artwork jointly created by Chinese contemporary artist Zou Cao and “isolated elders,” or elderly people who have no family, has recently been finished and revealed to the public. 

The art piece took Zou and his partners two months to create. There are 10 different versions of the art prints. The main subject of the prints is the Temple of Heaven, which was built in Beijing in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). 

Taking a close look at the art, one can see the architecture has been depicted with thousands of overlapping fingerprints. Compared to figurative paintings, the architecture looks slightly surreal, yet the artwork’s purpose is to be close to reality as Zou wanted to reconnect the marginalized “isolated elders” group with mainstream society. 

“These elderly people are not just a community that needs to be helped. The idea of ‘everyone joins in the public welfare project’ can be achieved when the elderly participate in the whole art-making process,” Zou told the Global Times. 

The art practice was originated as a charity program that was launched by the Tencent Foundation. The program is called “grandparent companionship project.” It offers support including food and companionship for 10,000 elderly people across the country.

The idea for the artwork came from the fingerprints some elderly people left on their letters sent to the program’s volunteers. 

“I’ve been thinking about what I can do for the old people,” the artist told the Global Times and he added that the gap between fine art and society can be closed. 

The art piece of Temple of Heaven reflects a trending artistic topic that is called “socially engaged art,” art critic and museum expert Li Liyang told the Global Times. 

“This art form tries to make a response to what happens in society and everyday life. It is not just about changing the context but also reveals an artist’s longing and their focus on life practices,” Li told the Global Times. 

The prints will be auctioned and all the benefits will be donated to the elderly people. 

“I made the whole project into a ‘social sculpture,’ using artistic methods to change society based on what I, as an artist, can do,” Zou told the Global Times. 

A research forum that relates to this artistic practice has also been carried out. Veteran TV host Jing Yidan said that ageing is always a sore point of societies. The public should pay more attention not only to elderly people without families, but also other elderly groups such as people who have lost their children. 

Yu Yang, a famous art critic, said that Zou's fingerprint painting was different to his previous works. There is a genre transformation in turning the “prints” to “performance art,” Yu noted.

“Fingerprints are a symbol of contact in traditional Chinese culture. We can also interpret this as a commitment of the artist to his social responsibility,” Yu said.

Pregnant women who do not have enough folic acid — a B vitamin — in their bodies can pass the deficiency on to their unborn children. It may lead to retarded growth and congenital malformation, according to Dr. A. Leonard Luhby…. “Folic acid deficiency in pregnant women could well constitute a public health problem of dimensions we have not originally recognized,” he says. — Science News. December 9, 1967

Update
Folic acid — or folate — can prevent brain and spinal cord defects in developing fetuses. Since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required that all enriched grain products contain the vitamin starting in 1998, birth defects have been prevented in about 1,300 babies each year. But some women still don’t get enough folate, while others may be overdoing it. About 10 percent of women may ingest more than the upper limit of 1,000 micrograms daily — about 2.5 times the recommended amount, a 2011 study found. Too much folate may increase a woman’s risk for certain cancers and interfere with some epilepsy drugs.

Immediately after a 19-year-old shot and killed 17 people and wounded 17 others at a Florida high school on Valentine’s Day, people leaped to explain what had caused the latest mass slaughter.

By now, it’s a familiar drill: Too many readily available guns. Too much untreated mental illness. Too much warped masculinity. Don’t forget those shoot-’em-up video games and movies. Add (or repeat, with voice raised) your own favorite here.

Now the national debate has received an invigorated dose of activism. Inspired by students from the targeted Florida high school, as many as 500,000 people are expected to rally against gun violence and in favor of stricter gun laws on March 24 in Washington, D.C., with sister marches taking place in cities across the world. But a big problem haunts the justifiable outrage over massacres of innocents going about their daily affairs: Whatever we think we know about school shootings, or mass public shootings in general, is either sheer speculation or wrong. A science of mass shootings doesn’t exist.

“There is little good research on what are probably a host of problems contributing to mass violence,” says criminologist Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections in St. Paul. Duwe has spent more than two decades combing through federal crime records and newspaper accounts to track trends in mass killings.
Perhaps this dearth of data is no surprise. Research on any kind of gun violence gets little federal funding (SN Online: 3/9/18; SN: 5/14/16, p. 16). Criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University in Boston has argued for more than 20 years that crime researchers mostly ignore mass shootings. Some of these researchers assume that whatever causes people to commit any form of murder explains mass shootings. Others regard mass killings as driven by severe mental disorders, thus falling outside the realm of crime studies.

When a research vacuum on a matter of public safety meets a 24-hour news cycle juiced up on national anguish, a thousand speculations bloom. “Everybody’s an expert on this issue, but we’re relying on anecdotes,” says sociologist Michael Rocque of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

Rocque and Duwe published a review of what’s known about reasons for mass public shootings, sometimes called rampage shootings, in the February Current Opinion in Psychology. Their conclusion: not much. Scientific ignorance on this issue is especially concerning given that Rocque and Duwe describe a slight, but not unprecedented, recent uptick in the national rate of rampage shootings.
Shooting stats
Defining mass public shootings to track their frequency is tricky. A consensus among researchers is emerging that these events occur in public places, include at least four people killed by gunshots within a 24-hour period and are not part of a robbery or any other separate crime, Rocque and Duwe say. Such incidents include workplace and school shootings.
Overall, mass public shootings are rare, Duwe says, though intense media coverage may suggest the opposite. Even less obvious is that rampage shootings have been occurring for at least 100 years.

Using Federal Bureau of Investigation homicide reports, Congressional Research Service data on mass shootings and online archives of news accounts about multiple murders, Duwe has tracked U.S. rates of mass public shootings from 1915 to 2017.

He has identified a total of 185 such events through 2017, 150 of which have occurred since 1966. (In 2016, he published results up to 2013 in the Wiley Handbook of the Psychology of Mass Shootings.) In the earliest known case, from 1915, a Georgia man shot five people dead in the street, after killing an attorney he blamed for financial losses, and wounded 32 others. Another lawyer, who came to the crime scene upon hearing gunshots and was wounded by a bullet, ended the rampage when he grabbed a pistol from a hardware store and killed the shooter.

What stands out more than a century later is that, contrary to popular opinion, mass public shooting rates have not ballooned to record highs. While the average rate of these crimes has increased since 2005, it’s currently no greater than rates for some earlier periods. Crime trends are usually calculated as rates per 100,000 people for, say, robberies and assaults. But because of the small number of mass public shootings, Duwe calculates annual rates per 100 million people in the United States.

The average annual rate of mass public shootings since 2010 is about 1.44 per 100 million people. That roughly equals the 1990s rate of 1.41, Duwe finds.

The average annual rate from 1988 to 1993 reached 1.52, about the same as the 1.51 rate from 2007 to 2012. After dropping to just below 1 per 100 million people in 2013 and 2014, rates increased to nearly 1.3 the next three years.

From 1994 to 2004, rates mostly hovered around 1 per 100 million people or below, but spiked to over 2.5 in 1999. That’s the year two teens killed 13 people at Columbine High School in Colorado.

In contrast, rates were minuscule from 1950 to 1965, when only three mass public shootings were recorded. The average annual rate for 1970 to 1979 reached 0.52, based on 13 mass public shootings.

Numbers of people killed and wounded per shooting incident have risen in the last decade, though. Two events in 2012 were particularly horrific. Shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., resulted in 40 murders, many of children, and 60 nonfatal gunshot wounds. Whether this trend reflects an increasing use of guns with large-capacity magazines or other factors “is up for grabs,” Duwe says.
The unknowns
No good evidence exists that either limiting or loosening gun access would reduce mass shootings, Rocque says. Virtually no research has examined whether a federal ban on assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 contributed to the relatively low rate of mass public shootings during that period. The same questions apply to concealed-carry laws, promoted as a way to deter rampage killers. As a gun owner and longtime hunter in his home state of Maine, Rocque calls for “an evidence-based movement” to establish links between gun laws and trends in mass shootings.

Mental illness also demands closer scrutiny, Duwe says. Of 160 mass public shooters from 1915 to 2013, about 60 percent had been assigned a psychiatric diagnosis or had shown signs of serious mental illness before the attack, Duwe has found. In general, mental illness is not linked to becoming violent. But, he says, many mass shooters are tormented and paranoid individuals who want to end their painful lives after evening the score with those they feel have wronged them.

Masculinity also regularly gets raised as a contributor to mass public shootings. It’s a plausible idea, since males committed all but one of the tragedies in Duwe’s review. Sociologist Michael Kimmel of Stony Brook University in New York contends that a sense of wounded masculinity as a result of various life failures inspires rage and even violence. But researchers have yet to examine how any facet of masculinity plays into school or workplace shootings, Rocque says.

Although school shooters often report feeling a desperate need to make up for having been inadequate as men, many factors contribute to their actions, argues clinical psychologist Peter Langman. Based in Allentown, Pa., Langman has interviewed and profiled several dozen school shooters in the United States and other countries.
He divides perpetrators into three psychological categories: psychopathic (lacking empathy and concern for others), psychotic (experiencing paranoid delusions, hearing voices and having poor social skills) and traumatized (coming from families marked by drug addiction, sexual abuse and other severe problems).

But only a few of the millions of people who qualify for those categories translate their personal demons into killing sprees. Any formula to tag mass shooters in the making will inevitably round up lots of people who would never pose a deadly threat.

“There is no good evidence on what differentiates a bitter, aggrieved man from a bitter, aggrieved and dangerous man,” says psychologist Benjamin Winegard of Carroll College in Helena, Mont.

Nor does any published evidence support claims that being a bully or a victim of bullying, or watching violent video games and movies, leads to mass public shootings, Winegard contends. Bullying affects a disturbingly high proportion of youngsters and has been linked to later anxiety and depression (SN: 5/30/15, p. 12) but not to later violence. In laboratory studies, youngsters who play violent computer games or watch violent videos generally don’t become more aggressive or violent in experimental situations. Investigators have found that some school shooters, including the Newtown perpetrator, preferred playing nonviolent video games, Winegard says.

He and a colleague presented this evidence in the Wiley Handbook of the Psychology of Mass Shootings. Northeastern’s Fox also coauthored a chapter in that publication.

Still, a small but tragic group of kids lead lives that somehow turn them into killers of classmates or random strangers (SN: 5/27/06, p. 328). If some precise mix of, say, early brain damage, social ineptitude, paranoia and fury over life’s unfair twists cooks up mass killers, scientists don’t know the toxic recipe. And it won’t be easy to come up with one given the small number of mass public shooters to study.

Duwe recommends that researchers first do a better job of documenting the backgrounds of individual mass shooters and any events or experiences that may have precipitated their deadly actions. Then investigators can address broader social influences on mass shootings, including gun legislation and media coverage.

But more than a century after a distraught Georgia man mowed down six of his fellow citizens, research on mass violence still takes a backseat to public fear and outrage. “If we’re bemoaning the state of research,” Duwe says, “we have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Black holes have been beguiling from the very beginning.

Hinted at as early as the 1780s and predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they didn’t get the name we know today until the 1960s. Bizarre beasts that squash gobs of matter into infinitely dense abysses, black holes were once thought to be merely a mathematical curiosity.

But astronomers tallied up evidence for black holes’ existence bit by bit, puzzling over where these behemoths live, how they gulp down matter and what their existence means for other physics theories.

For more than a decade, a team of researchers has been engrossed in an ambitious effort to snap a picture of a black hole for the very first time. And now they’ve done it. What better time to think back to black holes’ origins and the journey so far?

A surprise ingredient may explain how lemon juice puts the squeeze on kidney stones.

Lemons contain nanoparticles that, when fed to rats, block stone formation, scientists report in the Feb. 22 Nano Letters. If the tiny sacs do the same for humans, the nanoparticles might one day offer a way to prevent kidney stones in people, says pharmaceutical scientist Hongzhi Qiao of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine.

Lemon juice is a well-known home remedy for kidney stones, which form when minerals crystalize and clump up inside the kidney (SN: 9/21/18). These rocky lumps can knock around in the urinary tract, slicing and dicing tissues as they eventually pass out of the body (SN: 10/31/16). “It’s so, so, so painful,” says Jingyin Yan, a nephrologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who was not part of the new study. Patients may feel sharp pain in their back, side or lower abdomen when they pass a stone, she says. “People describe it as worse than delivering a baby.”
Though some medications can help treat kidney stones, many people end up needing surgery to remove them, says Thomas Chi, a urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, also not part of the study. People often imagine kidney stones as tiny pebbles, but sometimes they bulk up like boulders, he adds. “I’ve taken out stones the size of your fist.”

That’s why prevention is key. Scientists already knew that citric acid, which gives lemons their sour power, may do the trick by binding to the minerals that make up stones. But drinking mouth-puckering lemon juice is not so comfortable for patients, Qiao says.

A 2022 clinical trial found that kidney stone patients had trouble downing 120 milliliters — about a half cup — of lemon juice per day. Swilling loads of lemonade can cause dental problems, too. Chi has had patients drink so much that the acidic liquid ate away at their teeth.

So Qiao and colleagues looked for other, more palatable lemon-derived ingredients that might help prevent kidney stones. Inside edible and medicinal plants like ginseng, grapefruit and dandelion, his team has found extracellular vesicle-like nanoparticles, tiny sacs stuffed with molecules including fat, protein and DNA.
These nanoparticles exist in lemon juice, too­­ — and the team fed them to rats that had also ingested a substance that promotes kidney stone growth. The zesty particles slowed stone formation, Qiao and colleagues found. The finding suggests these particles curb development of calcium oxalate crystals, the most common culprit of kidney stones. The particles can also soften the stones and make them less sticky, the team showed.

The new work challenges the conventional wisdom on how lemon juice works to combat kidney stones, Chi says. Using lemon nanoparticles to treat people is still a long way off, but the team’s results hold promise, he says. “The faster you can bring a finding like this towards a human clinical trial, the better.”

A new atlas of human genetic diversity reveals what human ancestors’ DNA may have looked like before people migrated out of Africa.

Ancestral humans carried 40.7 million more DNA base pairs than people do today, researchers report online August 6 in Science. That’s enough DNA to build a small chromosome, says study coauthor Evan Eichler, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Human ancestors in Africa jettisoned 15.8 million of those DNA base pairs — information-carrying building blocks of DNA often referred to by the letters A, T, G and C — before dispersing around the globe, the researchers discovered. As people left Africa and spread to other continents, they dropped more chunks of DNA. Eichler and colleagues have followed these genetic bread crumbs to map relationships among 125 human groups worldwide.
People didn’t just lose DNA. They also gained some. Compared with chimpanzees and orangutans, people have 728 extra pieces of DNA created when portions of the human genetic instruction book, the genome, were copied. Everyone has at least three copies of those duplicated bits, although the exact number varies from person to person.

Previous maps of human genetic diversity have usually not marked the yawning chasms left by deletions or the new territory created by duplications. Most diversity maps have focused on single DNA base pair changes, often called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. But all the SNPs together comprise only 1.1 percent of the genome. Duplications and deletions, collectively known as copy number variants, have shaped more than 7 percent of the human genome.

Story continues below infographic
Because duplications and deletions involve larger swaths of DNA than SNPs do, their influence on human evolution may also be bigger. Both duplications and deletions have been implicated in shaping human characteristics, such as bigger brains (SN: 3/21/15, p. 16; SN: 4/9/11, p. 15).

But researchers “can’t answer the question yet of whether what makes us human is in what was lost or what was duplicated,” says David Liberles, a computational evolutionary biologist at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Eichler’s choice is clear. “Duplications rock,” he says. “They affect more base pairs in the human genome than any other type of variation.” Duplications span 4.4 percent of the genome, while deletions represent 2.77 percent. And duplications tend to involve genes, while deletions often fall in spaces between genes, the researchers found.

His team flagged many duplications as possible medical and evolutionary points of interest. For instance, some groups of people have up to six copies of CLPS genes, which encode pancreatic enzymes that may help reduce blood sugar levels. Some African groups carry duplications of genes that may protect against sleeping sickness caused by trypanosome parasites.

Another attraction is a very large duplication of about 225,000 base pairs that Papua New Guineans inherited from Denisovans, an extinct group of hominids related to Neandertals. The colossal hunk of DNA contains two microRNA genes. MicroRNAs are small molecules that help regulate protein production. Eichler and colleagues calculate that the original duplication happened about 440,000 years ago in Denisovans. It was passed to Papuans and some other Melanesians about 40,000 years ago when their ancestors interbred with Denisovans. Now, about 80 percent of Papuans carry the duplication. Eichler speculates that the duplication may have given Papuan ancestors some evolutionary advantage, although what that advantage might be isn’t known.

While the researchers make a compelling case that duplications and deletions may play an important role in evolution, the team has provided little evidence that copy number variants really determine trait differences between groups, says Edward Hollox, a human geneticist at the University of Leicester in England. “It’s almost a paper saying, ‘Look, isn’t this interesting?’ But why it’s interesting they haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of.” Still, Hollox says the map will point other researchers to parts of the genome where evolution may have left its mark.

A close look at one protein shows how it moves molecular passengers into cells in the kidneys, brain and elsewhere.

The protein LRP2 is part of a delivery service, catching certain molecules outside a cell and ferrying them in. Now, 3-D maps of LRP2 reveal the protein’s structure and how it captures and releases molecules, researchers report February 6 in Cell. The protein adopts a more open shape, like a net, at the near-neutral pH outside cells. But in the acidic environment inside cells, the protein crumples to drop off any passengers.
The shape of LRP2’s structure — and how it enables so many functions — has stumped scientists for decades. The protein helps the kidneys and brain filter out toxic substances, and it operates in other places too, like the lungs and inner ears. When the protein doesn’t function properly, a host of health conditions can occur, including chronic kidney disease and Donnai-Barrow syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the kidneys and brain.

The various conditions associated with LRP2 dysfunction come from the protein’s numerous responsibilities — it binds to more than 75 different molecules. That’s a huge amount for one protein, earning it the nickname “molecular flypaper,” says nephrologist Jonathan Barasch of Columbia University.

Typically, LRP2 sits at a cell membrane’s surface, waiting to snag a molecule passing by. After the protein binds to a molecule, the cell engulfs the part of its surface containing the protein, forming an internal bubble called an endosome. LRP2 then releases the molecule inside the cell, and the endosome carries the protein back to the surface.

To understand this shuttle system, Barasch and colleagues collected LRP2 from 500 mouse kidneys. The researchers put some of the protein in a solution at the extracellular pH of 7.5, and some in an endosome-mimicking solution at pH 5.2. Using a cryo-electron microscope, they captured images of the proteins and then stitched the images together in a computer, rendering 3-D maps of the protein at both open and closed formations.
The researchers suggest that charged calcium atoms hold the protein open at extracellular pH. But as pH drops due to hydrogen ions flowing into the endosome, the hydrogen ions displace the calcium ions, causing the protein to contract.

In the early morning of February 6, a devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey, near the border with Syria. Numerous aftershocks followed, the strongest nearly rivaling the power of the main quake, at magnitude 7.5. By evening, the death toll had climbed to more than 3,700 across both countries, according to Reuters, and was expected to continue to rise.

Most of Turkey sits on a small tectonic plate that is sandwiched between two slowly colliding behemoths: the vast Eurasian Plate to the north and the Arabian Plate to the south. As those two plates push together, Turkey is being squeezed out sideways, like a watermelon seed snapped between two fingers, says seismologist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey.
The entire country is hemmed in by strike-slip, or sideways-sliding, fault zones: the North Anatolian Fault that runs roughly parallel to the Black Sea, and the East Anatolian Fault, near the border with Syria. As a result, Turkey is highly seismically active. Even so, Monday’s quake, which occurred on the East Anatolian Fault, was the strongest to strike the region since 1939, when a magnitude 7.8 quake killed 30,000 people.

Science News talked with Hough, who is based in Pasadena, Calif., about the quake, its aftershocks and building codes. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

SN: You say on Twitter that this was a powerful quake for a strike-slip fault. Can you explain?

Hough: The world has seen bigger earthquakes. Subduction zones generate the biggest earthquakes, as much as magnitude 9 (SN: 1/13/21). But quakes close to magnitude 8 are not common on strike-slip faults. But because they’re on land and tend to be shallow, you can get severe … shaking close to the fault that’s moving.

SN: Some of the aftershocks were very strong, at magnitudes 7.5 and 6.7. Is that unusual?

Hough: As with a lot of things, there’s what’s expected on average, and there’s what’s possible. On average, the largest aftershocks are a full unit smaller than the main shock. But that’s just average; for any individual main shock, the largest aftershock can have a lot of variability.

The other thing people noted was the distance [between the main shock and some aftershocks over a hundred kilometers away]. Aftershock as a term isn’t precise. What is an aftershock isn’t something that seismologists are always clear on. The fault that produced the main shock is 200 kilometers long, and that’s going to change the stress in a lot of areas. Mostly it releases stress, but it does increase stress in some areas. So you can get aftershocks along that fault, but also some distance away. It’s a little bit unusual, but not unheard of.

SN: People have wondered whether Monday’s magnitude 3 earthquake near Buffalo, N.Y., might be related.

Hough: A magnitude 7.8 quake generates [seismic] waves that you can record all around Earth, so it’s technically disrupting every point on Earth. So it’s not a completely outlandish idea, but it’s statistically exceedingly unlikely. Maybe if a seismic wave passed through a fault that was just ready to go in just the right way, it’s possible.

An interesting [and completely separate] idea is that you might get earthquakes around the perimeter of the Great Lakes [such as near Buffalo] because as the lake levels go up and down, you’re stressing the Earth’s crust, putting weight on one side or the other. That’s a source of stress that could give you these pretty small quakes.

SN: The images emerging from this deadly disaster are devastating.

Hough: It’s hard to watch. And it hammers home the importance of building codes. One of the problems that any place is up against is that building codes improve over time, and you’ve always got the problem of older structures. It’s really expensive to retrofit. I expect that earthquake engineers will be looking at the damage, and it will illuminate where the vulnerabilities are [in the area]. The hope is that with proper engineering, we can make the built environment safe.