1. Oklahoma continues to be rocked by earthquakes. A recent one was magnitude 5.1
and felt as far away as Kansas City. Historically (1978-2008) the
state experienced two earthquakes per year. Since the institution of
fracking for oil, the rate has increased to about 600X the baseline.
2. The instrumentation that measures gravitational waves has a precision
that is truly mind-boggling: "Each detector looks like a giant L, made
up of two tunnels, each 2.5
miles long. When a gravitational wave passes through, it stretches space
along the direction of one tunnel and squishes space along the
direction of the other. That stretching and squishing effectively
changes the tunnels' lengths, and that change can be detected by lasers
inside each one. The system is so sensitive it can see fluctuations as small as 1/10,000 the diameter of a proton."
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