Seismologists and app developers are shaking things up with a new app that transforms smartphones into personal earthquake detectors. By tapping into a smartphone's accelerometer — the motion-detection instrument — the free Android app, called MyShake, can pick up and interpret nearby quake activity, estimating the earthquake's location and magnitude in real-time, and then relaying the information to a central database for seismologists to analyze. In time, an established network of users could enable MyShake to be used as an early- warning system, the researchers said.

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