Most of what we know about the Earth's interior comes from observing seismic waves. These travel at somewhat different speeds depending on the details of the rock they're moving through—whether it's solid or semi-molten, how much water is present, whether it's fractured or solid material, and so on. Get enough data from enough seismic events, and you can start piecing together a picture of what's present at different depths below the surface.

In many cases, we can get this data from naturally occurring events like earthquakes. In others, we intentionally create waves using things like explosives, providing the opportunity to do imaging in specific areas without needing to wait for an earthquake. Now, a team of scientists at Penn State suggests there's a potential option that sits between waiting for an earthquake and triggering your own seismic event: thunderstorms.

Some of the energy carried by thunder enters the Earth's upper crust, triggering what are termed "thunderquakes." But, for various physical reasons, the seismic signals are extremely complex, making it difficult to extract clear signals from them. The Penn State team says it has finally constructed a model that can help make sense of this complexity and used it to reconstruct the terrain under the local campus.

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This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Quake by id Software, if you could believe it. To commemorate that, publisher Bethesda has released a new campaign chapter for the game, titled "Dawn of the Machine."

This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.

The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days.

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