Measles outbreaks, and terrorist chatbots

Authorities in Japan have confirmed that dozens of people were killed when a 7.5 moment magnitude earthquake struck the Noto peninsula on New Year's Day. The island nation is located in one of the most active earthquake zones on earth. So, what happened, and how does Japan cope with such frequent and powerful tremors? Here’s James Jackson, a professor of active tectonics at the University of Cambridge.

James - This earthquake was relatively unusual in Japan in that it was on the West coast of the main island, Honshu, rather than the east coast. So the big earthquake in 2011, the Tohoku earthquake which damaged the nuclear power station at Fukushima, that was on the East coast. And what's happening on the East coast is that the Pacific floor is sliding underneath Japan. And that's happening quite quickly, geologically speaking, at about eight centimetres per year. And that makes very large, big earthquakes under the water and that's why you get big tsunamis. This earthquake was on the West coast of Japan, where that process is not happening. There's nothing sliding back into the earth. The earthquakes are pretty shallow and instead what they represent is Japan being squeezed. It's being crumpled up. So it's not just the escalator sliding underneath Japan, but as that happens, Japan is being squeezed. And occasionally you get faults which pop up along the west coast. And that's what happened this time. And it's happened before the last time there was one this size on that same area of the west coast was in 1964 at Niigata. And that one, the fault was also offshore. So it made a tsunami about five metres high and it killed about 40 people. But this one is about a hundred kilometres down the coast. And as far as we can see, most of the fault which moved was onshore. And that is why there's not really been a significant tsunami.

Will - And you mentioned it then, but it's something that stood out to me that was quite interesting is, as you said, the epicentre of this earthquake was quite shallow. It was only about 10 kilometres. For reference, the 2011 earthquake in Japan was at a depth of 29 kilometres. Does the depth at which the quake takes place have any effect on our experience at the surface?

James - Both of those are relatively shallow. But on the East Coast, the escalator, as it goes down underneath the east coast, goes down as far as 670 kilometres. So you get earthquakes all the way down, because as the escalator, if you like, goes down it also breaks up. And so you get deep earthquakes all the way down there, all those earthquakes. 20 is not going to make much difference frankly, whether you're at 30 kilometres or 15. But it does make a difference if you are 600 kilometres down where you are, even at the surface, so far away nothing really is going to do anything to you.

Will - Japan is no stranger to earthquakes. This is the 14th above magnitude 5.5 in the past 10 years alone. And as you've spoken about the remarkable area in which Japan sits is probably the reason as to why they get so many. But how do the authorities there try to manage the risk for events with such little warning?

James - There are a number of interesting points about this. Firstly, Japan is curiously helped by there being so many earthquakes. Even on the west coast, where they're not that frequent. But between the 1964 one and this one, these are two comparable earthquakes, there were probably half a dozen or a little bit smaller, but enough to shake you up and really scare you. So when you say to people in Japan, 'earthquakes are a problem. You need to do something and make everyone safer and your houses better,' it's not a theoretical discussion. They know this will affect them in their lifetime. This is not something you can say maybe my grandchildren will have to think about. No, it will affect them for sure, but also you and your children. So that means it's really at the forefront of people's consciousness and that's a big help. Japan is indeed very resilient to these things. But that's not chance, that's the result of decades of careful hard work, finding out what the problems are. Lots of conversations between the public, public administrators responsible for public safety, and the scientists, and the engineers. And again and again, earthquakes in Japan show that the architects and engineers can design things which will stay up. And the issue is always, when these buildings are built, do the constructors, the building people, actually follow the instructions precisely. It really matters that you don't cut corners to save time and money because anything you do will weaken that original design. But if you follow it precisely, the buildings are likely to be fine. And that is the message again and again from Japan. These things are sort of a quiet triumph of the integrity of the building industry in Japan, which is much admired and respected around the world because in the rest of the world it really isn't much like that. It probably is getting there in places like Chile and New Zealand. But that is a huge achievement.

Will - And as you say, we are still very much in the process of finding out what's happened, search and rescue, that sort of stage in development. But in the medium to long-term future, do you think there are any lessons that Japan can learn from this earthquake as to perhaps better prepare or change the way they see these sorts of things?

James - I think the Japanese are constantly learning lessons from these events, which is why they get better and better. They're not complacent. I mean these things are a tragedy. This one is a tragedy and a lot of people have died. A lot of destruction. It'll cost a lot of money. Lots of people's lives will be really messed up by all this. But from a perspective of people far away, as I say, Japan is much admired and respected because this size earthquake, anywhere in the big earthquake belt, which goes from the Mediterranean to China, routinely kills tens of thousands of people. And that is not likely to happen in Japan. And that is a tremendous achievement. And sometimes you lose track of that. I mean, it is really an astonishing thing, that huge earthquake in 2011 on the east coast, which was a hundred times bigger than this one. The earthquake itself did very little. It was the tsunami, which is a slightly separate story, coming later which drowned 20,000 people and knocked out the nuclear power station. But the infrastructure was really not that much damaged by the earthquake itself, which is a fantastic achievement.

Scientists from the Universities of Warwick and Durham say they have discovered how a shift in our ancestors' habitat may have prompted early humans to change their vocalisations and ensuing language. Charlotte Gannon is a language psychologist and lead author on the paper.

Charlotte - 17 million years ago, we started to have this big continental tectonic movement. So our geographical landscape completely changed. We moved from living in this dense forests-like world to much more open landscapes. And as a result of all these climate changes, we then started to have all of these different evolutions within our hominid line. So we were really interested in looking at that period when we came down from the trees and started living in these more open landscapes.

Will - So how do you take the tools and things that we have nowadays and turn back the clock and try and recreate something that was going on millions of years ago?

Charlotte - So we use two vocalisations that orangutans make. So orangutans are really important. They're the only arboreal great ape. They're still spending the majority of their time up in the trees. They also make many different vocalisations, but two in particular that we were really interested in were called the kiss squeak and the grumph. So kiss squeaks are what we refer to as consonant-like calls, and grumphs we refer to them as vowel-like calls. So when we make a consonant-like noise, so say a P or a B or a T, we are manipulating the tongue and the mouth and the jaw. And when we make an A-E-I-O-U, we are not using any of that manipulation. We're just making the sounds. And when an orangutan makes a kiss squeak, they follow a very similar pattern of mouth manipulation that we do when we make the consonants. And when they make the grump, again, like the vowels, there is none of this manipulation.

Charlotte - So we're able to kind of use them almost a bit like really early consonant and vowel-like sounds. So we were able to take recordings that we'd had previously and we were able to play these across the Savannah in South Africa.

Will - And what did you find when you played these vocalisations out?

Charlotte - We found that the consonants actually travelled much further than the vowels, which was really interesting. So the kiss squeak noise that the orangutans were making were still about 80% audible at 400 metres, whereas the vowel-like or the grumph calls, they were actually dropping off around 125 metres.

Will - I guess this is a question more acoustics than psychology, but do we have any idea why that might be?

Charlotte - Interestingly, we initially expected the opposite. So the kiss squeak calls are a higher frequency, and the grumph light calls are a low frequency. We would actually expect, from what we know about our frequencies and our law of sound propagation, that the lower frequency sound should have travelled a lot further. And really interestingly, I think it does highlight the importance of actually using the living great apes that we've got. Because if we ran this through a simulator, we would've actually expected the opposite. And what we're looking at could actually be more of an indication as to what happened to our early ancestors and maybe also how differently our vocalisations will have been back in the day.

Will - The idea then is that we shifted to a more consonant dominated vocalisations because it allowed us to communicate better and over further distances. What kind of advantages do you think that would've brought?

Charlotte - If you look upon, not just how far the actual vocalisations you're travelling, but that's how far the message will have been travelling. So if we could have been relying on these consonant light noises to travel much further, then the information was travelling further. It will have helped our social bonding, it will have helped our cognition, it will have helped strengthen our society and helped move our evolution further.

Will - The more I read about it, the more that this seems like because language is so fundamental to our cognitive development, that this could be one of the most important shifts towards us becoming the species we are today.

Charlotte - Language in particular is really hard to study because it doesn't fossilise. We can always carbon date anything we find, but language is just this great big mystery. We know we have it, and we know we're the only animal in the entire world that has it in such a way that we do. A lot of different areas of research will come back to language. You can look at child development, you can look at psychiatry, everything. A lot of it can always be linked back to language, language therapy, all of these things. And yet there's still this big great mystery around language. And I think if we really want to fill in the big jigsaw puzzle as it was about our story language is one of the really important pieces.