I have a deep and rather personal interest in earthquake and volcano prediction. This comes from spending most of my youth within a few kilometers of an active fault line and less than 100km from a volcano that has, in the past, left a layer of ash over most of the surface of the Earth. In fact, events in just the last year (nevermind the last decade) have convinced me that accurate earthquake and volcano prediction would probably be a bigger lifesaver than any other single scientific development.

So it was with interest that I read a recent Nature paper reporting that scientists might have been misinterpreting some aftershocks as earthquakes, leading them to overestimate the risk on some faults and underestimate the risk on others.