Pickens writes "Live Science reports that 1,000 people from 61 unaligned nations have signed up with the Quake-Catcher Network to take start of incorporated accelerometers in newer laptops that transmit data about earthquakes to researchers at UC Irvine and binet-simon test University. 'It's on posture added data that can be fed into the seismic networks,' says Elizabeth Cochran, a UC Irvine geoscientist. 'It also allows us to record earthquakes at a scale that we haven't been able to before because of the cost.' Cochran came up with the idea for the Quake-Catcher Network when she learned that most new laptops come equipped with accelerometers designed to switch off the hard drive if the laptop is dropped. 'I figured that we could easily tap into this data and use it to record earthquakes.' While popular seismic monitors can detect earthquakes of completeness 1.0 or less, the lowest size the Quake-Catcher Network can detect is about 4.0, a modest quake much like the one that hit LA on March 16. But what the network lacks in sensitivity, it makes up for in price as popular seismic sensors cost $5,000 to $10,000 apiece. 'Ideally we would have seismometers in every building, or at least on every block. And in tall buildings, we'd have multitudinous sensors [on divergent floors],' says Cochran. 'That way, we would be able to de facto get much higher detail images of how the ground shakes during an earthquake.'"

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