L.A. basin at risk for worst earthquakes
South Central Los Angeles and the city’s northern San
Fernando Valley could be at risk of the most serious shaking in a
major Southern California earthquake, according to a study released
Tuesday.
A map released on the eve of the deadly 1994 Northridge
earthquake lays out places around Southern California that might
experience amplified shaking because of their geology.
Deep basins filled with sediment could shake four times as hard
as rocky, mountainous areas, and the middle of such a basin could
rock twice as hard as the rim, according to the study by the
Southern California Earthquake Center, a research consortium.
Unfortunately, those relatively flat areas tend to be Southern
California’s most heavily populated sections and tend to
contain old buildings that are at the highest risk of earthquake
damage, experts said at a news conference at the University of
Southern California.
“Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do,”
said Lucy Jones, a seismologist in charge of the earthquake hazards
program in Southern California for the U.S. Geological Survey.
“There will be more shaking on soft soil, and that is where
most of us live. That’s the flats of the city.”
Digital library acquires humanities
database
The California Digital Library has chosen Alexander Street
Press, L.L.C., to provide University of California students and
scholars with new electronic resources in the humanities and social
sciences. This is the first system-wide acquisition of Alexander
Street products by the California Digital Library.
The full-text databases acquired are North American
Women’s Letters and Diaries, Colonial-1950 and The American
Civil War: Letters and Diaries. These collections will be
accessible to more than 300,000 students, faculty and staff on the
10 UC campuses.
North American Women’s Letters and Diaries is the largest
electronic collection of women’s diaries and correspondence
ever assembled.
The collection includes more than 100,000 pages of published
letters and diaries from Colonial times to 1950, plus 4,000 pages
of previously unpublished manuscripts, in electronic format for the
first time.
The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries knits together more
than 100,000 pages of diaries, letters and 4,000 pages of
previously unpublished manuscripts in facsimile form, memoirs that
provide fast access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of
the war.
UC Davis may house mouse breeding facility
A public hearing concerning the environmental impacts of a
proposed mouse-rearing facility at the University of California,
Davis, is scheduled for 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 29, at the campus’
University Club.
The facility, to be known as The Jackson Laboratory, JAX West,
at UC Davis, will include a 96,000-square-foot building on a 6-acre
site near the University Airport, west of the main campus.
This will be the first facility established in the West
Enterprise Zone, a 44-acre area of campus designated for lease to
firms and organizations collaborating with UC Davis researchers.
The mouse facility will be leased to The Jackson Laboratory, a
private nonprofit research organization, for breeding and
maintaining genetically standardized mice used for biomedical
studies.
The proposed JAX West facility, to be located on an undeveloped
site on Hopkins Road opposite the University Airport, will be a
highly sterile building for producing inbred and genetically
standardized research mice.
It will also be used to distribute such mice to researchers at
UC Davis and other West Coast universities and research
centers.
Compiled from Daily Bruin wire reports.