Fiber-optic cables buried beneath Pasadena, California, revealed that Southern University and A&M College fielded the loudest marching band at the 2020 Rose Parade.
By Katherine KorneiOn New Year’s Day, Zhongwen Zhan joined hundreds of thousands of spectators in Pasadena, California, for the Rose Parade.
But Zhan, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, was there for his work as much as for entertainment. While he held his young daughter and watched marching bands and flower-covered floats go by, Zhan knew that two buried fiber-optic strands thinner than a human hair were recording vibrations from the parade.Sprawling networks of fiber-optic cables, which power today’s phone, television, and internet services, fan out like