How Google’s Earthquake Alerts Protected Millions — And How to Turn It On in Quake-Prone Countries When two massive earthquakes (7.2 and 7.5) struck Venezuela recently, the country had no national early warning system. But millions of Android phones lit up with loud alerts seconds to minutes before the shaking hit — giving people precious time to drop, cover, and hold on. Google’s clever system turns the accelerometers in over 2 billion Android phones into a giant crowdsourced seismic network. It detects the first waves, confirms the quake, and blasts notifications to users in the affected area. In Venezuela, it reached 11.4 million people — proving technology can save lives even where governments can’t. How to activate it (works in nearly 100 countries): Open Settings on your Android phone. Tap Safety & Emergency (or search for “Earthquake alerts”). Select Earthquake Alerts and toggle it ON. Keep Location services ena...
Ordinary computers manipulate "bits" of information, which, like light
switches, can be in one of two states (represented by 1 or 0). Quantum
computers manipulate "qubits": units of information stored in subatomic
particles, which, by the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics, may be in states |1> or |0>, or any
"superposition" (linear combination) of the two. As long as the qubit
is left unmeasured, it embodies both states at once; measuring it
"collapses" it from the superposition to one of its terms. Now, suppose a
quantum computer has two qubits. If they were bits, they could be in only one of
four possible states (00,01,10,11). A pair of qubits also has four
states (|00>,|01>,|01>,|11>), but it can also exist in any
combination of all four. As you increase the number of qubits in the
system, you exponentially increase the amount of information they can
collectively store. Thus, one can theoretically work with myriad
information simultaneously by performing mathematical operations on a
system of unmeasured qubits (instead of probing one bit at a time),
potentially reducing computing times for complex problems from years to
seconds. The difficult task is to efficiently retrieve information
stored in qubits — and physicists aren't there yet.
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