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Ever wonder what happens to old subway cars when subway lines upgrade to newer trains? In Beijing at least, the ones used pre-Olympics have been shipped to Sichuan and converted into temporary winter shelters. Ten DK-16 trains, each with six cars, are now in Guangyuan, a city north of Sichuan's capital Chengdu.
Hello there, I'm in Tokyo for a few weeks. The remnants of the summer heat linger like a mosquito; even as it rains you can feel. My first morning here, a 4.8 earthquake rumbled through the city. Judging from the poise Lisa's family displayed, Japan's citizens are far better at responding to earthquakes than even Californians. Part of that comes from the common frequency of quakes in the region, but I'd also like to give credit to the good old Earthquake simulation truck, pictured in the video above. Advanced technology, indeed.
Whenever our journalistic brethren get to set something on fire and douse it with water, we like to commemorate the moment. Wired's Gadget Lab just performed such a battery of tests on the SentrySafe fire-and-flood proof hard drives, ones we first saw almost a year ago. On one hand, the test went as predicted, but on the other hand, data doesn't seem as protected as you might think.
After yesterday's California earthquake everyone and their dogs* is posting videos online. Mobile Phones, camcorders, digital cameras, or CCTV, it doesn't matter: like the following clips show, it looks like this era of democratised gadgetry has made humans eager to record their own destruction, perhaps as a last chance to leave a notch in History. I can see it already, when the fourth angel sounds the trumpet, people will take out their mobile phones and start recording a video of the Apocalypse. Except iPhone users, who would only be able to take photos. That and change their Facebook status to "is watching the asteroid falling."
You might've noticed that the ground got a little rumbly California. You also might've noticed that the phone lines are basically blowing up. AT&T is officially recommending to only "make emergency or urgent calls" and use text messaging instead, to keep lines open for emergency personnel. Facebook and Twitter are other options (if you're one of those people), or reader Paul used his phone's IM client to talk to people. If you've got other non-phone suggestions, drop 'em in the comments, though stuff should be normal soon. [AP]
The recent Sichuan Earthquake in China was so intense, tremors were felt all the way over in the tallest completed building in the world--the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan--a whole eight minutes after the quake originated. (The title of tallest building period was taken by the Burj Dubai back in May.) What's interesting about the 101 is that it has a gigantic suspended tuned mass damper, or hanging ball, which takes up four stories and works like this to prevent the building from falling over and tragically crushing office workers. This 730 ton sphere looks intimidating when still, but wait until you see it in motion during the earthquake.
Dash over at Fleshbot's got a very interesting look at Ars Elektronika in SF, where inventors and teledildonics fanatics gather together to show off the weird, gadgety and sexy things they made in their sex dungeons. One invention is a vibrator that's connected to the U.S. Geological Survey which only activates during an earthquake somewhere in the world. "Only trouble is that when your own "Big One" finally arrives, it's tempered by the realisation that a building might have collapsed somewhere with people trapped inside." It gets better. Another is tied to how many Iraqi civilian deaths there are a day which you can read about over at Fleshers (NSFW). [Fleshbot]
The tragedy of the recent earthquake in central China, which has claimed over 20,000 lives at last count, has just the smallest bit of silver lining. The Chinese government has been uncharacteristically loose with information, and millions of Chinese netizens are, for the first time, almost completely uncensored.
Seismologists at Stanford are learning from their roommates over in the biology department and rigging up a distributed computing system to gather quake data from laptops with accelerometers. It's used to save resources for scientists by using assets (your laptops) that are already deployed in a widespread area. They're rolling this out primarily in quake-heavy areas like SF and LA, but should be spreading to other zones later.
One of the big Oh Noes about working for Giz is getting to see sexy new phones, enjoying a quickening of the pulse and then thinking, "Buggerama," as you realise that said sodding handset is only available in Japan. Casio's W61CA uses Exilim technology to give you a five-megapixel camera that will survive rainstorms and being dunked in the bath. No surprise then, that it's being marketed as a sports phone, and comes in that sizzling yellow shade so beloved of Akio Morita. Full specs are below.
