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Most systems designed to protect buildings from earthquakes act like springs or shock absorbers to dissipate the temblor's energy. But a different and much cheaper system--based on pendulum physics--is now being tried out on the U.S. Court of Appeals building in San Francisco.
The historic 60,000-ton courthouse has been empty since it was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Now it's in the midst of one of the largest earthquake retrofitting projects ever. To install the new Friction Pendulum System (FPS), engineers will take the...