Disguise Yourself as A Stone With The Stone Coat
Icelandic textile artist Ýr Jóhannsdóttir made the perfect garment for the chilly geology enthusiast with The Stone Coat.
geology
Baking with Geology!
The Earth’s crust is divided into four major layers: the crust, the mantle, the outer core, and the inner core. The crust is approximately 5-30 miles thick, being the thinnest at the oceanic layer (up to 5 miles thick) and the thickest at the continental layer (up to 30 miles thick).
How-To: Make beach glass in a cement mixer
Rich Faulhaber wanted enough sand-polished “beach glass” or “sea glass” (Wikipedia) to cover a walkway, and didn’t want to spend the rest of his life combing beaches for it. So he figured out how to make his own knock-off version. [via Boing Boing]
Distributed earthquake monitoring using laptop accelerometers
Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.
“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.
So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.
Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,’ ” Lawrence says.
