When earthquakes strike, one of the more present dangers occurs not above, but below ground (hope your pet can detect it).

Seismic shock waves hit the sandy soil often found at a building's foundation, turning it into quicksand slush that proves disastrous for the building's frame. Enter Bacillus pasteurii - a soil bacteria undergoing experiments in potentially ground-breaking (no pun intended) research that hopes to minimize the said liquification process.

To get the petrification process started, the bacteria is first injected into the targetted sandy soil along with nutrients and oxygen. As the bacteria digests the oxygen and nutrients, they generate calcite (calcium carbonate), which binds sand particles together, forming a natural cement that doesn't leave any toxic residue like its chemical counterparts. Imagine the sort of images they've been picking up on Mars, and you get the picture (once again, no pun intended)

"Starting from a sand pile, you turn it back into sandstone," said Jason DeJong, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis. The bacteria's applications are currently in small-scale lab tests, although Prof. DeJong and the rest of the team are planning to up-size their experiments to the point of using the earthquake-simulating centrifuge at UC Davis' Center for Geotechnical Modeling.