Catching quakes with laptops
Monday, October 27, 2008 - 13:28
in Physics & Chemistry
Inside your laptop is a small accelerometer chip, there to protect the delicate moving parts of your hard disk from sudden jolts. It turns out that the same chip is a pretty good earthquake sensor, too -- especially if the signals from lots of them are compared, in order to filter out more mundane sources of laptop vibrations, such as typing.