Word: answerability
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...answer is maybe...
WITS & WAGERS The average human tongue has how many taste buds? In this lively trivia game, teams ponder such stumpers and jot down their answers. Players then wager points on which team's guesses are closest to the correct answer...
...this area get slammed so hard? At least part of the answer lies in the loosely consolidated sediment that sits below the surface. Seismic waves pass quickly through bedrock, but they become trapped in sediment-filled basins. "It's sort of like being in a bathtub filled with water," says USGS seismologist Thomas Brocher. "When you start splashing, the waves keep bouncing up and down and from side to side." The basin effect amplifies not only the intensity of the shaking but also its duration, which is no doubt why buildings collapsed in Santa Rosa in 1906, killing some...
What will happen when the Hayward Fault--or the San Andreas--goes off? Scientists who study ancient quakes cannot answer that question because it depends on details that sediments do not preserve. But using a new 3-D model of the earth's crust in the Bay Area, USGS geophysicist Brad Aagaard and his colleagues can run simulations that tweak different parameters for earthquakes that have already occurred and for those still to come. The results range from the expected to the quite surprising...
Aagaard and his colleagues have started using their earthquake simulator to try to answer the most tantalizing questions of all: What if the rupture of the fault had not started directly off the San Francisco coastline? What if it had started farther south, so that instead of breaking away from the city it had aimed right toward it? What if it had started farther north and broken south? In the first instance, the tentative answer is that San Francisco gets shaken even harder; in the second, it's Silicon Valley and the Livermore Valley that find themselves clamped...