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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		A smartphone that doubles as a seismometer
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:00
	Publish Date:		2016-04-05 00:00:00
	Description:		What if your smartphone could double as a seismometer? Thanks to your phone’s sensors and a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, now it can. The app is called MyShake, and it can quickly issue a warning to those in danger zones when the shaking starts. Graduate student Qingkai Kong developed the algorithm, which works by gathering information from a worldwide network of phones. "We can identify the location, magnitude, and also the origin and time of the earthquake. The benefit is that at places where we don’t have a traditional seismic network…we can monitor the earthquake, and we can issue the earthquake early warning to reduce the earthquake hazard." MyShake’s algorithm can distinguish natural human activity from earthquake movement. The app is currently available for Android, but Kong hopes iPhones will be next. "So we are now considering we expand it to iPhones and other platforms very soon in the future."
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