S U M M A R Y We study in-plane ruptures on a bimaterial fault governed by a velocity-weakening friction with a regularized normal stress response. Numerical simulations and analytical estimates provide characterization of the ranges of velocity-weakening scales, nucleation lengths and background stresses for which ruptures behave as cracks or pulses, decaying or sustained, bilateral or unilate...

In this paper, we present and discuss a new interval-based method of reliability estimation using fault trees for the case of uncertain and time-varying input reliability data. The approach is based on the generation of output distributions (probability estimates with appropriate ranges of uncertainty) which preserve the effects of uncertainty in the input (component or subsystem-level) data. T...

[1] The northern Longitudinal Valley fault in eastern Taiwan creeps at the surface with a small rate of 1 cm/yr but slips in large earthquakes. To improve seismic hazard assessment, it is important to comprehend the slip deficit rate distribution at depth. We discovered 25 ML 2.1– 4.6 repeating earthquakes in this area and inverted GPS measurements for producing an image of the along-strike spa...

We report here the complete genome sequences of three border disease virus (BDV) strains of the same subgenotype isolated in Switzerland from a sheep, a cow, and a pig, respectively. This is the first report of full-length sequences of a tentatively new subgenotype isolated from three different species of cloven-hoofed farm animals.

Inter-vehicle communication is becoming increasingly important in recent years. Traditional research efforts on vehicular networks have been put into safety or infotainment applications. In this article, we propose a Vehicular Mesh network (VMesh) to inter-connect disjoint sensor networks and act as a data transit network. Our VMesh networks are designed to provide a low cost, high fidelity, sc...

As a significant and growing source of the world’s energy, wind turbine reliability is becoming a major concern. At least two fault detection techniques for condition monitoring of wind turbine blades have been reported in early literature, i.e. acoustic emissions and optical strain sensors. These require off-site measurement. The work presented here offers an alternative non-contact fault dete...

We conducted paleoseismic studies in a closed depression along the San Andreas fault on the north flank of Frazier Mountain near Frazier Park, California. We recognized two earthquake ruptures in our trench exposure and interpreted the most recent rupture, event 1, to represent the historical 1857 earthquake. We also exposed evidence of an earlier surface rupture, event 2, along an older group ...