17 Dec

Posted at 00:22h in Scoop.it

The Android app harnesses a smartphone’s motion detectors to measure earthquake ground motion, then sends that data back to the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory for analysis. The eventual goal is to send early-warning alerts to users a bit farther from ground zero, giving them seconds to a minute of warning that the ground will start shaking. That’s enough time to take cover or switch off equipment that might be damaged in a quake.

 

To date, nearly 220,000 people have downloaded the app, and at any one time, between 8,000 and 10,000 phones are active — turned on, lying on a horizontal surface and connected to a wi-fi network — and thus primed to respond.

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: news.berkeley.edu

11 Dec

Posted at 11:58h in Scoop.it

There’s an abundant new swath of cosmic real estate that life could call home—and the views would be spectacular. Floating out by themselves in the Milky Way galaxy are perhaps a billion cold brown dwarfs, objects many times as massive as Jupiter but not big enough to ignite as a star. According to a new study, layers of their upper atmospheres sit at temperatures and pressures resembling those on Earth, and could host microbes that surf on thermal updrafts. Mild temperatures provide a benefit to worlds more massive than Jupiter.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.sciencemag.org

09 Dec

Posted at 19:09h in Scoop.it

Empathy Maps help to rapidly put your team in the user’s shoes and align on pains and gains — whether at the beginning of a project or mid-stream when you need to re-focus on your user. Empathy Map…

Sourced through Scoop.it from: medium.com

09 Dec

Posted at 18:34h in Scoop.it

Another “impossible” crystal has been found locked inside a Russian meteorite. The specimen is a quasicrystal, a type of material that shatters the rules of crystallography by having an ordered — yet never-repeating — arrangement of atoms. The new find is only the third natural quasicrystal ever found and is the first discovered in nature before being synthesized in a lab, researchers report online December 8 in Scientific Reports.

 

All three natural quasicrystals came from the same meteorite, discovered in a far-flung region of eastern Russia (SN: 11/3/12, p. 24). University of Florence geologist Luca Bindi and colleagues found micrometers-wide bits of the new quasicrystal in a grain of the meteorite collected during a 2011 expedition to the site. Probing the quasicrystal with electrons showed that the mineral is composed of aluminum, copper and iron atoms arranged in a way that’s similar to the pentagon-based pattern on a soccer ball.

 

Like its siblings, the new quasicrystal formed before landing on Earth when a cosmic fender bender between two space rocks caused rapid melting and cooling under extreme pressures, the researchers propose. While natural quasicrystals remain rare, companies have tinkered with using lab-made versions in everything from electronics to frying pan coatings.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.sciencenews.org