Laptop Shock Sensors Could Help Predict Earthquakes
Earthquakes strike dozens of times every day around the world, usually doing no more than rattling a few dishes, but occasionally causing some real damage. There's a worldwide network of sensors able to track and locate the center of earthquakes after they've struck, but a new network is being built up in the hopes of detecting quakes as they happen, communicating that information to those likely to be impacted, and even possibly beating the quake itself. At the center of this is not some fancy, expensive worldwide sensor array -- instead, it's a bunch of laptops.So how on earth is the everyday laptop helping solve one of the natural disaster prediction riddles of the ages? You see, hard disk drives, the spinning things where most people store data on laptop or desktop computers, are fairly fragile things. They contain platters of information spinning at high RPM, with the heads that read from them skimming the surface a few fractions of a millimeter away. Give it a hard knock and the head whacks the disk, resulting in data loss. For this reason, many laptops contain accelerometers, which can detect when the laptop is about to hit the ground after a fall (the hard disk is then automatically stopped temporarily for protection).
This program uses those same accelerometers in a network of laptops to detect quakes. Right now, there are only three laptops connected (enough to successfully detect last month's quake in southern California), but the hope is to eventually deploy a much larger collection and, ultimately, warn those in harm's way. We're just hoping they put in some safeguards to make sure the information is valid; we wouldn't want a bunch of jokers jumping up and down with their laptops to set off early warning sirens across the state. [Source: BBC News]
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