text: Like many scientists, I am aghast at an Italian court's conviction of geoscientists on criminal charges for their judgements made about seismic risks prior to a 6.3 magnitude earthquake that descimated the L'Auqila, capital of the Abruzzo region, and killed more than 300 people in 2009.
  Anyone who lives there knows that L'Aquila lies in a tremendously seismically active area of Italy. In fact, Italy is one of the most earthquake-prone regions of the world— dozens of earthquakes occur every day there though many are low magnitude and not felt by human beings. But sizeable seismicity is recent history: a 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck Eboli, south of Naples, in 1980, killing more than 2,700 people and another major quake struck the Molise region in 2002, killing 28 people, including 27 children who died when a school collapsed.
  Though not as closely related as they are to hippos, whales have much in common with elephants. Speaking scientifically, they belong to different taxonomic orders—whales to the taxonomic…