Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve got a laptop with a built-in accelerometer, you, too, could help detect earthquakes.

It turns out an ordinary laptop is all people need to join the 1,000-volunteer Quake-Catcher Network, which transmits data about earthquakes to researchers at UC Riverside and Stanford University, LiveScience reports.

The accelerometers in today’s laptops power down the hard disk in the event of a fall or sharp jolt. Elizabeth Cochran, a UC Riverside geoscientist, came up with the idea of tapping into the accelerometers to record earthquakes, the report said.