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Earthquake Invisibility Cloak
BuzzSkyline writes "The same folks who brought us the tsunami invisibility cloak last year have now come up with an earthquake invisibility cloak. They show that a platform made of just the right configuration of elastic rings could make a structure invisible to earthquakes by effectively steering a quake around the structure. It doesn't work well for compression waves, but the researchers claim it could hide buildings from the slower-moving, more destructive shear earthquake waves. The research is due to be published soon in the journal Physical Review Letters."
It should be perfectly safe to cloak all buildings. Buildings only absorb a tiny fraction of the shock of an earthquake; you don't need to have something man-made fall over just to keep the waves from going further. Now if you somehow made huge chunks of land cloaked to earthquakes, I would agree that the shaking may have to come out somewhere. But anyway at that point you're talking about making an isolated chunk of land whose borders crunch and stretch a lot more than everything else -- people wouldn't go for that. And I don't see how you'd do it anyway, you can't just seismically isolate a chunk of land.