Friday, June 14, 2024

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour causes seismic activity in Scotland

 

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour causes seismic activity in Scotland

Taylor Swift's Era's Tour has broken huge records in ticket sales, but her concerts in Edinburgh, Scotland, just tipped another scale — the seismic scale. Fans at her concerts last weekend danced so hard they generated seismic activity that was felt nearly four miles away from the Murrayfield Stadium, according to the British Geological Survey.

BGS says three songs consistently generated the most seismic activity during each of the three Edinburgh shows: "…Ready For It?" "Cruel Summer" and "champagne problems."

"…Ready For It?" starts with a loud, blown out bass beat and is 160 beats per minute, making it the perfect song for triggering seismic shakes, BGS said. The crowd transmitted about 80 kilowatts of power, or about the amount of power created by 10 to 16 car batteries, according to BGS.

The Friday, June 7 concert showed the most seismic activity, with the ground showing 23.4 nanometers of movement, BGS found.


Taylor Swift performs at Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium on June 7, 2024, in Edinburgh, Scotland. / Credit: Gareth Cattermole/TAS24

While the crowd shook the Earth enough for it to register at BGS' monitoring stations miles from the venue, people in the immediate vicinity of the stadium were likely the only ones to feel the Earth shaking.

This is not the first time a crowd has created a quake — and Swifties are usually the culprits.

During a 2011 NFL playoff game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New Orleans Saints at what was then called Qwest Field in Seattle, Marshawn Lynch made a play that drove the crowd so wild they caused shaking that registered on a seismometer.

Scientists were interested in the stadium shake, which earned Lynch a new nickname: "Beast Quake." But last July, Swift proved it's not just football fans who can create tremors in Seattle. During her Eras Tour concert at the venue, a quake registered on the same seismometer.

"The actual amount that the ground shook at its strongest was about twice as big during what I refer to as the Beast Quake (Taylor's Version)," Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, told CBS News at the time. "It also, of course, lasted for hours. The original Beast Quake was a celebration on the part of some very excited fans that lasted maybe 30 seconds."

When Swift took her tour to Los Angeles' SoFi stadium in August, a California Institute of Technology research team recorded the vibrations created by the 70,000 fans in the stands. 

Motion sensors near and in the stadium as well as seismic stations in the region recorded vibrations during 43 out of her 45 songs. "You Belong with Me" had the biggest local magnitude, registering at 0.849.

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Former ICU nurse is arrested on suspicion of replacing fentanyl with tap water

 

Former ICU nurse is arrested on suspicion of replacing fentanyl with tap water

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A former intensive care unit nurse has been arrested for allegedly swapping patients' pain medication with tap water, police in Medford, Oregon, announced Thursday.

Dani Mari Schofield faces 44 counts of assault in the second degree, charges that "reflect the total amount of patients that this investigation revealed to have been affected by Schofield’s criminal actions," the Medford Police Department said in a statement.

Assault in the second-degree charges are filed when an individual "intentionally or knowingly causes serious physical injury to another," the statement said.

The arrest comes nearly seven months after officials at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center, a 378-bed hospital in Medford, contacted police with concerns about a growing number of central line infections among patients. Central lines are tubes put into large veins to administer medication.

“There was concern that Schofield had been diverting patients’ liquid fentanyl for her personal use and then replacing it with tap water, causing serious infections,” Thursday's police statement said.

Police did not say how many of the patients that Schofield allegedly mistreated had died. In March, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the estate of Horace Wilson, an Asante patient who died after he was admitted to the hospital with a lacerated spleen and broken ribs following a fall off a ladder in January 2022.

The lawsuit alleged that while hospitalized, Wilson's pain medication was replaced with nonsterile tap water, introducing bacteria into his bloodstream that led to his death.

The lawsuit named both Asante and Schofield as defendants, accusing them of negligence. Neither responded to requests for comment at the time.

The allegations of drug diversion — a term that refers to misappropriating prescribed medications, sometimes to abuse or illegally sell them — were first reported by NBC affiliate KOBI-TV in Medford in December 2023. The station said that at least one patient at Asante had died after a nurse allegedly diverted their pain medication.

An attorney for Schofield, who police said left Asante in July 2023, did not immediately respond to a voicemail seeking comment.

Records from the Oregon State Board of Nursing show that Schofield voluntarily agreed in November 2023 to a nursing license suspension, "pending completion of an investigation.”

In an internal memo sent Thursday to Asante employees after police announced Schofield's arrest, president and CEO Tom Gessel thanked law enforcement for its "tireless work since our team brought concerns forward to them."

"We are greatly appreciative of the countless hours their investigators have spent on this complex matter," he wrote.