How it feels when you sitting on your bed and suddenly falls down, and later comes to know, an earth quake arrives. But how about if your laptop tells you that earth quake is on its way...Lets check out how...
From the quakes of as low as 4.4-magnitude jostle in Los Angeles to as high as February's magnitude 8.8 disaster, ordinary laptops are increasingly acting as miniature seismic stations. They are becoming part of army known as the Quake-Catcher Network, which takes advantage of built-in accelerometers in newer laptops to transmit data about earthquakes to researchers at UC Riverside and Stanford University.
About 1,000 people from 61 countries have signed up so far. If the network gets large enough, researchers say, it could act as a low-cost earthquake warning system.
The newest laptops come fitted with accelerometer(motion detectors), whose job is to switch off the hard drive whenever the laptop is left idol. So this clicked the minds of scientist and decided to use it as quake detectors.The Quake-Catcher software program, runs in the background on the laptop and becomes active when the user is idle.When the accelerometers detect a quake, the program automatically transmits data about the type and intensity of shaking over the Internet to the researchers.In the case of a power or Internet outage, the data is saved locally and transmitted later.
Most of the time, earthquakes don't take out power and Internet immediately, so the software provides immediate data on at least the first few seconds of shaking.To filter earthquake data from people bumping or dropping their laptops, the system only flags an earthquake when many computers in one area record motion at once.These computer-based sensors aren't as sensitive as traditional seismic monitors, which can detect earthquakes of magnitude 1.0 or less. The lowest magnitude the Quake-Catcher Network can detect is about 4.0, a moderate quake much like the one that hit LA on March 16.Six of the 30 to 50 laptops in the LA area reported that shaking. The largest quake the network has recorded was Chile's February 27 temblor, which was captured by a USB accelerometer being tested by a professor at the University of Concepcion in Chile.But to get this one has to pay $5000 in order to get alert when ever the disasters arrives without a knock to your home.Now its on you life or money...
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