University of California, Berkeley, graduate student Qingkai Kong wants to put these sensors—in particular, the accelerometer—to better use, says Jonathan Amosfor the BBC, by turning your smartphone’s three-dimensional motion detector into a little seismic wave detection system.

Many new cell phones are bristling with an array of sensors—a compass, a gyroscope, a GPS sensor and an accelerometer—that help the phone figure out where it is and which way it’s pointing, a boon when using mapping or other location-based applications.