Days Get Shorter Because of Chilean Earthquake [Science]

Apart from a colossal tsunami, here's another effect of the 66.6 exajoules liberated by this weekend's earthquake in Chile: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that days will now be shorter because the quake shifted Earth's axis by three inches.

The change—which can only be measured thanks to computer models—will result in days that are 1.26 microseconds shorter than before. That's 0.00000126 seconds shorter. There may have been more visible changes, like islands changing its position. One of them, Santa María, may have raised two meters after the shattering land move.

This is not the first time this has happened, as every single earthquake has an effect on the planet's axis.
[Gizmodo via Business Week]

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An Accelerometer 1,000x More Sensitive Than the iPhone's [Sensor]

HP has developed an inertial accelerometer that's so sensitive, it can detect a change in the position of its center chip of less than one-billionth the width of a human hair.

The sensor is part of HP's unfortunately named CeNSE (Central Nervous System for the Earth) program, whose aim is to build a 'planetwide network' of tiny sensors to measure anything and everything about the environment. It's the first prototype in the CeNSE project, and it's safe to say they're starting off on the right foot:

Hartwell's device is sensitive enough to 'feel' a heartbeat. The source of that sensitivity is a 5mm-square, three-layer silicon chip. A portion of the center wafer is suspended between the two outer wafers by flexible silicon beams. When the chip moves, the suspended center lags behind due to its inertia. A measurement of that relative motion is used to calculate the speed, direction and distance the chip has moved.

While the larger CeNSE project may have environmentalist overtones, the first practical application is going to be from oil behemoth Shell. They'd like to use the sensors to detect pockets of oil, allowing them to drill more efficiently. Eventually, HP hopes to move to "city-level" projects that digitally capture what the five senses do—and in some cases, what they can't. And when they finally stuff that sucker in a Wiimote, Super Smash Bros. will never be the same.
[Gizmodo via HP via Fast Company]

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