Some scientists are claiming that the Sichuan Earthquake, which killed over 70,000 people, might have been caused by a 150m-high dam constructed just 170m from the fault line.
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.
There’s nothing to stop Japan’s infamous earthquakes, but there are better ways to get ready for them. Citizen is developing the Seismic watch to take advantage of the country’s “Earthquake Early Warning” radio service. It will pick up the radio signal as much as 10 seconds faster than the mobile text-message alternative. The way the watch alerts you of a coming earthquake does have a certain cinematic disaster-movie intensity to it. More »
