Landslide alarm

Just after midnight on 8 August, a massive landslide sent nearly 2 million cubic meters of rock and mud hurtling through several towns in Zhouqu County, China. The natural disaster killed more than 1500 people in the county, which sits in a valley between two mountains in Gansu Province. Three months later, more than 250 people were still unaccounted for. Though their breakthrough is too late for the Zhouqu disaster, researchers at Loughborough University, in England, reported in October that they have developed an electronic system that can warn of an impending landslide by picking up the telltale sounds of shifting earth.