Gearfuse

Scientists are predicting that in 30 years, California is going to get seriously twisted. Now I’m not talking about having one too many shots of Patron here; I’m talking about horrific natural disasters known as earthquakes. Lucky for Apple fanboys living out west, your Macbook may end up saving the lives of thousands of people.A team of researchers from the Quake Catcher Network at Stanford have developed software that allows the internal accelerometer in Apple laptops to measure and analyze shakes. Before start crying about how your girlfriend bumps into your nightstand on a daily basis, you should know that minor bumps and shuffles will be ignored by the software. In time, the collection of readings should help the group better predict earthquakes and their patterns, thus improving warning times for area residents.

Sorry for calling Orange County “The OC” but I’m sure you Californians will smoke enough grass to get over it.

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When Facebook announced that they would be rolling out their new Facebook Chat service, all that was said was that it would be rolled out very gradually to the public. What we didn’t know is that the social networking service was systematically rolling out the new service to their favorite group of Ivy Leaguer’s first.

The first people who were gifted with the new service were members from the Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT networks within Facebook, who were all among the first communities to give Facebook a following. We guess allowing those users to get first dibs is there way at giving back to the community. By the way, I’m still banned from requesting new friends, thanks to the “You might know these people” feature, and me, adding 5 people in successive fashion. Come on, Facebook! — Andrew Dobrow

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