A three-bedroom house, complete with plates on the kitchen table and a car in the garage, was built on top of a ‘shake table’ (Image: Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation)
A simulated 6.7-magnitude earthquake was set off in a New York laboratory on Tuesday to test how a house would stand up to the shaking.
The test was carried out at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York. A three-bedroom house, complete with plates on the kitchen table and a car in the garage, was built on top of a “shake table” and rigged with hundreds of sensors before being subjected to the violent wobble test.
The simulated quake, which lasted just a few seconds, sent furniture and televisions flying around. It caused surprisingly little damage to structure and, most unexpectedly, all the windows remained intact.
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The test was co-ordinated by researchers from five different US universities as part of a four-year research project aimed at helping architects design houses for earthquake-prone areas.
“This test is monumental in terms of data gathering. We have a wealth of data,” says lead investigator Andre Filiatrault.
New designs
“Perhaps this knowledge now can trickle down to better provisions, requirements and building codes,” Filiatrault adds, “so that we can save more lives.”
The simulation was the largest ever conducted on a wooden building, the researchers say. More than 250 sensors were used to gather detailed information from each part of the house and a dozen video cameras – eight inside and four outside – also recorded the shaking.
John van de Lindt, principal investigator at Colorado State University, says the results of the test will “probably change the way we model wood-frame structures”.
The simulated quake was designed to replicate the Northridge quake that struck Los Angeles, California, in 1994, causing extensive damage to wooden-built homes in particular. The disaster left more than 50 people dead and thousands more homeless, and caused more than $40 billion-worth of damage.
Another research project will test a six-story wooden-frame building on the world’s largest shake table in Miki, in Hyogo prefecture, Japan, early in 2009. The Japanese facility was developed following the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)