Nepal estimates that last weekend's magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed as many as 15,000 people, but that's just the latest seismic tragedy — more than a million people have died in earthquakes in the past 20 years alone, The Economist explains in the video below. And mostly what kills people is being crushed under collapsing buildings. But "it's possible to design buildings so they're more resilient to earthquakes, keeping them light and flexible so that they can absorb and distribute the energy of their movement," the mellifluous narrator explains. And not all the techniques are new — Japanese builders discovered one trick at least 14 centuries ago. Watch below to learn some basics of earthquake-proof architecture, and the nifty way you test it. —Peter Weber
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