It’s called the “eco-friendly ductile cementitious composite” (EDCC). For those who don’t speak engineering, that means spray-on cement that’s nice to the planet. It can be sprayed onto walls as a reinforcement against very powerful shaking.
The trick is that rather than fracturing — as normal concrete does in strong quaking — this stuff bends due to its fiber-reinforced design. In simulations the EDCC kept walls intact when subjected to violent shaking equivalent to the 2011 9.0-9.1-magnitude earthquake in Tokohu, Japan.
The team hopes that the EDCC could eventually be applied everywhere from homes to pipelines to offshore platforms and more.