New Way to Help Find Quake Survivors -Sniffer Rats
475636
Sniffer rescue dogs trained to find explosives or earthquake survivors buried in rubble may soon have some competition -- rats.
95578
The BBC News website has received many appeals for missing persons following the Asia earthquake disaster. Can you help?
704654
(InfoWorld) - Cellphones in Japan could soon provide a vital warning seconds ahead of a major earthquake. The country's three largest cellular carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and Softbank Mobile, plan to develop a way to automatically funnel alerts to cellphones from a new government advance warning system, which went into operation last year. The system, operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), ties together an extensive network of earthquake monitors on a high-speed network to provide data to a variety of users, including TV stations, manufacturers, and cellphone operators. The system provides warnings by measuring the primary waves (P-waves) from a quake, which are weak and fast-moving, to automatically predict when the slower and much more destructive secondary waves (S-waves) will arrive at a given location and how strong they will be. The amount of warning varies and could be anything from a few seconds to up to a minute. People closer to the quake's epicenter get shorter warnings -- and in some cases might get none at all -- but researchers agree that the possibility of any warning is better than none. The government data, which will provide the base for the cellphone system, has already been supplied to a number of groups, including manufacturers and hospitals. The buildings are equipped with receivers to receive data from the government or service providers. The alarm system is designed to automatically stop heavy machinery or save PC data. In the future, it may also be able to automatically shut off gas valves. In the earthquake that hit Kobe in 1995, more people died from resulting fires than from the quake itself. The cellphone companies hope to have a system launched in 2008. Â
670413
Survivors of the gigantic undersea earthquake on Sunday that swallowed coastlines from Indonesia to Africa - which officials now describe as one of the
514906
Witness accounts after huge waves triggered by an earthquake devastated Asia.
431228
US researchers are turning to peer-to-peer technology to help in the wake of natural disasters.
93594
Text messages could soon be at the heart of a system to help people cope in the aftermath of disasters.
675540
The emerging science of infrasound may help track -- or even predict -- earthquakes and other disasters. By John Geirland from Wired magazine.
30901
A tsunami detector built from ordinary PCs linked over a peer-to-peer network has been demonstrated in Austria.
450183
OJIYA, Japan  - Rescuers who saved a toddler  buried for four days by Japan's deadliest earthquake in a  decade were unable to pull off a second miracle for his sister  on Thursday, but some small signs of normal life returned to  the quake-hit region.
518912
An environmental monitoring station in southern China is recruiting people with keen noses to sniff out foul gases in the atmosphere and provide more accurate readings of air quality.
457649
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Thousands of terrified Indonesians were searching for shelter yesterday after an earthquake killed at least 70 people and damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings on Sumatra island.
572059
COLOMBO -- Mobile phones using technology reserved for eavesdropping and spying came in handy in locating stranded tourists and rescuing them after the tsunami havoc in Sri Lanka, officials said.
735276
Anxious relatives trying to locate survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster overwhelm a Red Cross website set up to help track loved ones. Organizers are setting up a larger server.
655621
After years of helping readers lose  themselves in remote and far-flung parts of the world, travel  publisher Lonely Planet is now trying to find them amid the  tens of thousands dead or missing in tsunami-hit countries.
763905
(InfoWorld) - Governments seeking inexpensive technology to warn of tsunamis could be interested in a free software application that monitors vibrations in the hard disks of computers in an attempt to detect the underseaÂ earthquakes that cause tsunamis. The Tsunami Harddisk Detector is the brainchild of Michael Stadler, who demonstrated the prototype system earlier this week at the Ars Electronica exhibition in Linz, Austria. As part of their operation, hard disks measure vibrations in order to keep the read-write head of the disk on track. These measurements can be read from some hard disks. The Tsunami Harddisk Detector captures this vibration data and shares it with computers in other locations connected via a peer-to-peer network to determine whether an earth tremor is occurring. In the p-to-p network, several participating computers act as supernodes, which analyze the data received from the other "sensing" nodes. The supernodes are able to ignore vibrations generated by a computer being kicked or shaken, by recording how many computers report the same vibrations simultaneously. If an earthquake that could lead to a tsunami is detected, the supernodes inform the other nodes. Computers running the client software and connected to the p-to-p network can then warn of such events. The software is able to provide such warnings because the seismic waves produced by earthquakes travel at about 5,000 kilometers per hour, while tsunamis move much slower at 500 to 1,000 kilometers per hour, Stadler explains on hisÂ Web site. The speed difference leaves time to evaluate tremors and, if necessary, warn of a tsunami. On his Web site, however, Stadler points out that his system is still in the experimental stage with some inherent problems and can't be fully relied on to provide a "serious prediction" of a tsunami risk in its present configuration.
693710
Survivors of the Java  coast's tsunami were trying to pick up the pieces of their  lives on Thursday, despite repeated aftershocks that have been  shaking pasts of the island and spreading fresh fear.