But, given the vast population — Tokyo and its surroundings are home to 39 million people — any strong temblor could be devastating.

“Even if you’ve got, let’s say, a 7.5, that would be serious,” the seismologist said.

Japan is located on the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanos and fault lines spanning the Pacific Basin, and is regularly hit by earthquakes.

But before last week’s quake — the largest to hit the country since it started keeping records 130 years ago — few geologists considered Japan to be a strong candidate for a 9-plus earthquake, said Andrew Moore, of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

There is mounting evidence, however, that Japan has been struck by several severe quakes in the last 3,500 years — most in the northern reaches of the country. Sand deposits indicate that several quakes have spawned 30-foot-high (9-meter-high) waves that slammed into the northern island of Hokkaido, he said, the most recent in the 17th century.

Similar deposits underlie the city of Sendai — the area rocked last week — with the most recent from an 869 A.D. tsunami that killed 1,000 people and washed more than 2.5 miles (three kilometers) inland.

Free Speech Coalition Executive Director Diane Duke said Thursday her group will oversee the database as part of a new program intended to fill the gap created by the closure of Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation earlier this month.

“We will be able to provide a list of recommended providers to our performers and ensure they will have sensitivity to the client base that we’d be bringing to these providers,” Duke said at a news conference.

Known as the AIM clinic, the shuttered San Fernando Valley facility was a preferred medical provider for many performers in the multibillion-dollar porn industry, providing a discreet environment for frequent HIV and STD tests.

The Free Speech Coalition’s program to replace AIM, known as Adult Production Health and Safety Services, won’t open a new clinic.

“Unfortunately, the FSC is not in a position to set up a medical facility or a clinic,” said board member Christian Mann, who is also a general manager at Evil Angel Video. “One of the things we learned from the closure of AIM is to avoid overreaching.”

Within a week, Duke said, performers will be provided a list of labs and clinics where they can get testing and have their results fed into the database.

The password-protected database allows actors and producers to track whether performers have been diagnosed with gonorrhea, chlamydia or if they are HIV positive.

The database will tell users whether an actor is available to work or not, depending on whether they have any of the sexually transmitted infections the system tracks.

The system makes an exception for HIV-positive gay performers who still work in sex scenes while using condoms.

Former Los Angeles County STD program director Dr. Gary Richwald is serving the trade group as a consultant and says the group is now reaching out to medical providers with education to ensure sex performers aren’t treated with insensitivity and hostility for their work.

Archaeologists are hoping to recover an anchor from what’s presumed to be Queen Anne’s Revenge in the waters off the coast of Beaufort, where the ship sank in 1718, just five months before Blackbeard was killed in a battle at Ocracoke Inlet. The artifact is the second-largest item at the shipwreck, outsized only by another anchor.

Researchers were scheduled to go out on two boats to retrieve the anchor from the shipwreck that’s about 20 feet underwater, then bring it ashore. The work to retrieve the anchor began last week. It’s about 13 feet long with arms that are 8 feet across.

The timing of the recovery of the anchor couldn’t be better for North Carolina officials, trying to increase tourism interest in the shipwreck. “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” starring Johnny Depp, was released earlier this month and features both Blackbeard and the Queen Anne’s Revenge.

The anchor is located on top of other items that the Queen Anne’s Revenge project hopes to recover from the central part of the ship. QAR project director Mark Wilde-Ramsing has said the only remaining parts of the ship — the wooden hull structure, ribs and a plank — are at the bottom of the pile, protected by ballast that was stored there to keep the ship upright. Six cannon and four anchors are also in the pile.

The largest exhibit of artifacts from the shipwreck, which was discovered in 1996, will be shown starting June 11 at the N.C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort. Wilde-Ramsing has said the team hopes to recover all the artifacts by the end of 2012.

In 1717, Blackbeard captured a French slave ship and renamed it Queen Anne’s Revenge. Blackbeard, whose real name was widely believed to be Edward Teach or Thatch, settled in Bath and received a governor’s pardon. Some experts believe he returned to piracy after growing bored with land life.

Volunteers from the Royal Navy killed him in Ocracoke Inlet in November 1718, five months after the ship thought to be Queen Anne’s Revenge sank.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge shipwreck site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Sites, has already yielded more than 250,000 artifacts.

The 30-year-old redhead plays Brad Pitt’s wife in filmmaker Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” which was awarded the top prize at the Cannes film festival last week.

The movie, a meditation on life set against the background of a Midwestern family in the 1950s that also stars Sean Penn, arrives in select U.S. movie theaters on Friday.

But that’s not the only film the newcomer has on her resume, nor the only A-list actors and directors who want to work with her.

Later this summer Chastain stars in the drama “The Help,” based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel; “The Debt,” an espionage drama starring Oscar-winner Helen Mirren; and the crime drama “The Fields” opposite Sam Worthington.

Two more of her films are scheduled to come out this fall — one opposite Al Pacino — and still others in 2012.

“I’ve made 11 films, nine are (waiting for release), Chastain told Reuters in an interview. “I’m a little worried that people will get sick of me. But because the characters are so different in each film, hopefully they won’t.”

Blame it on Malick, the semi-reclusive but revered filmmaker who gave Chastain her big break in “Tree of Life.” Though the director’s films — including “Badlands” and “The Thin Red Line” — are hardly commercial hits, the critical acclaim they engender makes Hollywood sit up and take notice.

“Tree of Life” was shot three years ago but Chastain said her association with the film instantly “changed my world” and “opened doors for me to work with other directors.”

The four-country, six-day tour has produced plenty of enduring images, from Obama knocking back a pint of Guinness in a tiny Irish village and drawing tens of thousands for remarks in central Dublin, to hobnobbing with Britain’s royal family at Buckingham Palace. But there have been few memorable policy breakthroughs.

Even at the G-8 summit in France, Obama and world leaders agreed on a path toward financially supporting fledgling democratic movements in Egypt and Tunisia, but stopped short of backing a specific monetary package. The G-8 did say it would aim to provide $40 billion in funding, though officials did not provide a breakdown of where the money would come from or when.

That’s not to say Obama’s trip won’t be considered a success. The kind of soft diplomacy the president has engaged in can go a long way in currying favor from allies when their support is needed on tough issues. And the White House doesn’t have to look far down the line for opportunities to cash in on that support, with the first phase of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan set to begin in July, and the U.S. and its NATO allies locked in a bombing campaign in Libya that has no end in sight.

The White House also hopes images of the president being greeted by cheering crowds and American-flag waving Europeans could give Obama a boost on the domestic front, where Republican contenders are lining up to run for his job. One of those GOP hopefuls, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, already has taken a dig at Obama’s popularity here, taking to Twitter to say he “sorry to interrupt the European pub crawl,” but could Obama outline his Medicare plan?