Citizen seismology helps decipher the 2021 Haiti earthquake.

On 14 August 2021, the moment magnitude () 7.2 Nippes earthquake in Haiti occurred within the same fault zone as its devastating 2010 7.0 predecessor, but struck the country when field access was limited by insecurity and conventional seismometers from the national network were inoperative.

REGAT: A permanent GPS network in Algeria, configuration and first results.

The REGAT () geodetic network is composed of 53 continuously-recording GPS stations distributed in the Algerian Atlas. It spans the whole width of the Algerian coast and reaches 300 km inland, with inter-sites distance of about 100 km. One additional site is located in Tamanrasset in the southernmost part of the country.

Afar triple junction triggered by plume-assisted bi-directional continental break-up.

Divergent ridge-ridge-ridge (R-R-R) triple junctions are one of the most remarkable, yet largely enigmatic, features of plate tectonics. The juncture of the Arabian, Nubian, and Somalian plates is a type-example of the early development stage of a triple junction where three active rifts meet at a 'triple point' in Central Afar. This structure may result from the impingement of the Afar plume into a non-uniformly stressed continental lithosphere, but this process has never been reproduced by self-consistent plume-lithosphere interaction experiments.

Hydrologically-driven crustal stresses and seismicity in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

The degree to which short-term non-tectonic processes, either natural and anthropogenic, influence the occurrence of earthquakes in active tectonic settings or 'stable' plate interiors, remains a subject of debate. Recent work in plate-boundary regions demonstrates the capacity for long-wavelength changes in continental water storage to produce observable surface deformation, induce crustal stresses and modulate seismicity rates. Here we show that a significant variation in the rate of microearthquakes in the intraplate New Madrid Seismic Zone at annual and multi-annual timescales coincides with hydrological loading in the upper Mississippi embayment.

Mothers' experiences of skin-to-skin care of healthy full-term newborns--a phenomenology study.

Objectives: Previous reports have shown that skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth is the optimal form of care for a full-term, healthy infant and its mother. As this is rarely researched the aim of this study was to explore experiences of skin-to-skin care in healthy mothers of healthy, full-term infants in the first days after birth.

Study Design: Using a lifeworld phenomenological approach, 20 women who had childbirth in hospital and were practising skin-to-skin care were interviewed 1-2 weeks after birth.

Triggering of New Madrid seismicity by late-Pleistocene erosion.

The spatiotemporal behaviour of earthquakes within continental plate interiors is different from that at plate boundaries. At plate margins, tectonic motions quickly reload earthquake ruptures, making the location of recent earthquakes and the average time between them consistent with the faults' geological, palaeoseismic and seismic histories. In contrast, what determines the activation of a particular mid-continental fault and controls the duration of its seismic activity remains poorly understood.

Skin-to-skin contact of fullterm infants: an explorative study of promoting and hindering factors in two Nordic childbirth settings.

Aim: To explore factors that promote or hinder skin-to-skin contact (SSC) during the first days after birth between parents and healthy fullterm infants.

Methods: A total of 117 postnatal mothers and 107 fathers/partners attending two childbirth settings, where Kangaroo mother care (KMC) was implemented as a standard routine of care, one in Sweden and one in Norway, were recruited consecutively and answered questionnaires two weeks postpartum.

Results: Satisfaction with support for SSC in postnatal care and being a mother in the Swedish setting was found to promote SSC during the first day postpartum; previous knowledge about SSC increased the practice also during the 2nd and 3rd days.

Time-variable deformation in the New Madrid seismic zone.

New geodetic measurements show that the New Madrid is currently deforming too slowly, if at all, to account for large earthquakes in the region over the past 5000 years. This result, together with increasing evidence for temporal clustering and spatial migration of earthquake sequences in continental interiors, indicates that either tectonic loading rates or fault properties vary over a few thousand years.

Strain accommodation by slow slip and dyking in a youthful continental rift, East Africa.

Continental rifts begin and develop through repeated episodes of faulting and magmatism, but strain partitioning between faulting and magmatism during discrete rifting episodes remains poorly documented. In highly evolved rifts, tensile stresses from far-field plate motions accumulate over decades before being released during relatively short time intervals by faulting and magmatic intrusions. These rifting crises are rarely observed in thick lithosphere during the initial stages of rifting.

Seismology: tectonic strain in plate interiors?

It is not fully understood how or why the inner areas of tectonic plates deform, leading to large, although infrequent, earthquakes. Smalley et al. offer a potential breakthrough by suggesting that surface deformation in the central United States accumulates at rates comparable to those across plate boundaries.

A 3-D marker-free system for the analysis of movement disabilities--an application to the legs.

The aim of this paper is to describe an approach allowing the analysis of human motion in three-dimensional (3-D) space. The system that we developed is composed of three charge-coupled-device cameras that capture synchronized image sequences of a human body in motion without the use of markers. Characteristic points belonging to the boundaries of the body in motion are first extracted from the initial images.