A fire in Valparaíso, Chile has destroyed more than 2,500 homes, left 11,000 people homeless and killed at least 15 people. It’s an unfathomable tragedy that has destroyed an entire community. This drone footage from Skyfilms attempts to show the extent of the damage caused by the fire’s wrath. It looks like a set of an apocalyptic movie, only it’s real people and real lives on the ground.
At 5:42 a.m. on March 27, 1964, a 9.2-magnitude earthquake erupted 78 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska. The earthquake remains the most powerful earthquake to strike North America, and the second-largest earthquake ever measured.
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In the matchup of wind turbine v. hurricane, our bets have traditionally been with the hurricane. But think about it this way: wind turbines are designed to suck energy out of wind. What if they could suck out so much energy that hurricanes like Katrina or Sandy never form in the first place—with the potentially destructive storm instead spun directly into electricity? That’s the win-win situation posited in a new study from Stanford and University of Delaware researchers.
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Do you have a cute and cuddly stuffed animal near you? If not, you might want to find one because what you’re about to read will scare you silly. And not the good kind of silly either. We’re talking The-End-Is-Coming sort of silly.
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Pakistan’s devastating earthquake this week killed hundreds, with a death toll that’s certain to rise. While the country recovers, the world has become fascinated by a geographic side-effect of the disaster: the quake was so powerful that it created a new island
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The second anniversary of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami is quickly approaching, and the country—public and private sectors alike—is doing everything it can to be prepared for the next disaster. Simply being prepared for the worst is vitally important, and, while stuffed animals are often handed out as a way to comfort children, this particular bear—chock full of emergency supplies—is far more useful. More »
There’s no doubt that earthquakes can be powerful, and usually the bulk of that power goes to destroying things. While you can’t stop an earthquake from quaking earth, a Victoria University student has found a way to divert some of that energy to monitoring the quake it came from. More »
An Italian court has sentenced six scientists and a former government official to six years in prison for a faulty prediction of the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila. What is this, the Salem witch trials? This is a dangerously anti-science precedent, even if it’s just in Italy. More »
We’ve seen some large-scale simulations, including some that couldn’t get larger. Simulated cellular networks are still a rare breed, however, which makes Sandia National Laboratories’ MegaDroid project all the more important. The project’s cluster of off-the-shelf PCs emulates a town of 300,000 Android phones down to their cellular and GPS behavior, all with the aim of tracing the wider effects of natural disasters, hacking attempts and even simple software bugs. Researchers imagine the eventually public tool set being useful not just for app developers, but for the military and mesh network developers — the kind who’d need to know how their on-the-field networks are running even when local authorities try to shut them down. MegaDroid is still very much an in-progress effort, although Sandia Labs isn’t limiting its scope to Android and can see its work as relevant to iOS or any other platform where a ripple in the network can lead to a tidal wave of problems.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Alt, Google
Sandia Labs’ MegaDroid project simulates 300,000 Android phones to fight wireless catastrophes (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Emergency services are embracing technology as new ways to investigate, send alerts and receive reports of crises. And now, the Japanese are looking at social networks to support communication in disaster scenarios, especially when traditional services fail. The local Fire and Disaster Management Agency put together a panel discussion on just that topic, with representatives attending from the likes of Twitter, Yahoo, Mixi and NHN Japan, as well as various government and emergency bodies. The talk was motivated, in part, by the March tsunami, when the internet was the sole means of information for some, and with initiatives like Google’s Person Finder playing a role in the aftermath. Any formal implementation of the ideas discussed is probably a long way off, and this is the first of three planned meets to hash it out. In the meantime, however, Twitter’s Japanese blog posted some suggestions on how their network could be used in emergencies — we just hope they won’t be needed anytime soon.
Filed under: Internet
Japan considers using social networks in disaster situations originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Aug 2012 01:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | PCWorld, Twitter blog (Japanese) | Email this | Comments
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