By downloading a free program, you and your laptop could help researchers pinpoint earthquakes and even sound an early warning to surrounding areas.
Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers -- motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user's data.
"As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes," says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.
So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It's a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer's accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.
Laptop accelerometers aren't as sensitive as professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it'll ping the researchers' server. "And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, 'This is a likely earthquake,' " Lawrence says.
Up until now, scientists have been hampered by the lack of enough sensors around the world to monitor and record earthquake data. Cochran and Lawrence hope their application will help build a network of earthquake sensors thousands of laptops strong.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126073353&ft=1&f=1007Quake-Catcher site:
http://qcn.stanford.edu/Muh! Interesting.