A small device originally used in laptops to prevent damage to its hard drive if it was dropped is being used as a tell sign for incoming earthquakes. The device successfully detected last months quake in Los Angeles.
As Jesse Lawrence, assistant professor of geophysics at Stanford University suggests, in this situation every moment counts. “If it is an earthquake, we could potentially send out signals to those who need it even before the energy from the quake has expanded out from the epicenter to those other people”