Millions of Android phones could soon start detecting earthquakes
Your phone can do a lot more than check email. (Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash/)Our smartphones are fantastic at conveying information, from the serious to the silly. But it’s easy to forget that they’re also powerful information-collecting devices. The GPS chip can grab a satellite signal to learn your location, companies like Apple can glean data about larger movement trends during COVID, and the onboard accelerometer senses motion. But that accelerometer, a standard piece of hardware, is finding new use from a novel Google initiative that will turn Android phones into a network of makeshift seismometers around the globe. Clusters of seismometers measure earthquakes in places like California, but Google hopes that this project will allow a multitude of Android phones to detect the earth-shaking events in areas of the world where there is a dearth of dedicated equipment. There’s no predicting these tremors, of course. But this detection...