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Hi listeners, Benjamin from the Nature podcast here.

I mentioned in last week's show that we weren't going to be having a regular edition of the podcast this week as we're running a bit of a skeleton crew at the moment. But one person that is here is Nisha Gained, Nature's European Bureau Chief. Nisha, thank you so much for joining me today. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Not at all. We're going to have a little bit of an extended news chat today.

And our first story is about earthquakes, but maybe not about the giant earthquakes that we cover on the show sometimes.

Yeah, this is a story about something that we don't talk about very often, which is very tiny little earthquakes that some researchers in California have managed to measure, and it's telling them lots more about

these faults that cause huge earthquakes. Right, and measuring huge earthquakes, I guess,

is relatively easy. They cause a huge spike on the kind of seismograph. How does one go about

measuring these tiny earthquakes, and maybe how tiny are they? These are earthquakes that can be

as small as magnitude.3, which is really,

really tiny. And the reason that it's difficult to detect them is that an earthquake of that

size doesn't even stand out very much from the noise that is also picked up by seismographs.

So that's been the challenge in trying to detect these tiny little quakes.

And how research has gone about sort of looking for these signals and in the noise?

So what this team dead was used, a combination of machine learning and supercomputers,

to identify these really tiny quakes from a huge amount of historical data.

They created a template of what real earthquakes look like

...