Earthquakes
We sometimes hear from readers who ask us questions about earthquakes, and where to go on the Internet to get up-to-date information on seismic activity. While the US Geological Survey (USGS) is the first authority on earthquakes in the United States, it's actually possible now to not only turn your own computer into a seismometer, but to share that information with scientists.
The program is called the Quake-Catcher Network (QCN), and was started by seismologists Dr Jesse Lawrence of Stanford University and Dr Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside. The software is built using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) which is is what computer scientists refer to as a distributed computing platform.
In an earthquake, items such as bookcases can topple over and cause injury or damage to other items in the room.
Here's a list of interesting facts and trivia about earthquakes.
You might find yourself on the wrong side of the news if you aren't familiar with earthquake terminology. These terms were mostly Greek to me when I first moved to California, but everyone should probably be familiar with them. 
