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Blue lights before earthquake? Scientists explain this strange phenomenon

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12 months ago

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Several videos on social media have surfaced from Morocco showing a blue flashlight emanating from the horizon, shortly before a potent 6.8 earthquake which struck southwest of Marrakech last Friday, leaving nearly 3,000 people dead and over 3,000 injured.

Rescue mission by a number of countries in the North African nation is currently underway as emergency services are searching rubbles for bodies and survivors. 

Earlier, a French expert also issued warnings about the aftershocks, despite the country not being in the “most active seismological region”.

CCTV on social media showed powerful flashes of light just before the shaking. Experts have termed these luminous phenomena real however, they are still scratching their heads about what causes them.

John Derr, a retired geophysicist who worked at the US Geological Survey told CNN that these different colours of lights are definitely real.

“Seeing EQL depends on darkness and other favorability factors,” Derr, who worked on these earthquake lights explained.

He said the recent “video from Morocco shared online looked like the earthquake lights caught on security cameras during a 2007 quake in Pisco, Peru.”

Juan Antonio Lira Cacho, a physics professor at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, who has studied the phenomenon, said video and security cameras have made studying earthquake lights easier.

Different earthquake lights

There are several types of lights as mentioned by a paper coauthored by Derr and published in the 2019 edition of the Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics.

the lights appear as normal lighting or sometimes it may look like a band same as a polar aurora. They may also look as floating in midair. One of the kind also includes a flame-like emanation from the ground.

To make sense of this, Derr and his colleagues collected all the concerned information from earthquake lights as old as the year 1600.

Their work was published in 2014 in a paper in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

Their findings revealed that some 80% of the earthquake lights were found in earthquakes of over 5.0 magnitudes. According to the findings, the occurrence was witnessed shortly before or during the earthquake, visible up 600 kilometres (372.8 miles) from the epicentre.

Most of the time, earthquakes take place in the nearby convergence areas of tectonic plates. However, the study found that in most of cases, luminous phenomena occurred within tectonic plates, rather than at their boundaries.

According to reports, these lights are most likely to be visible near rift valleys, places where Earth’s crust had been forced apart.

Theory explaining earthquake lights

A theory was put forth by Friedemann Freund, Derr’s collaborator, an adjunct professor at San Jose University and a former Nasa researcher.

Freund told CNN that when certain defects or impurities in crystals in rocks are put under mechanical stress — such as during activity between tectonic plates — they instantly break apart and generate electricity.

He noted that rock is an insulator that, when mechanically stressed, becomes a semiconductor.

He added: “Prior to earthquakes, huge volumes of rock — hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometres of rocks in the Earth’s crust — are being stressed and the stresses are causing shifting of the grain, the mineral grains relative (to) each other.”

“It’s like switching on a battery, generating electrical charges that can flow out of the stressed rocks into and through unstressed rocks. The charges travel fast, at up to around 200 metres per second,” he explained in a 2014 article for The Conversation.

Some other explanations also state that static electricity is produced by the fracturing of rock and radon emanation, among many others.

There is no agreement on this phenomenon and this mystery is being studied by the scientists.

Freund expected that there may come a time when it would be possible to use earthquake lights, or the electric charge that causes them, to help forecast the approach of a major earthquake.

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Google Makes The Decision To Boost Investments And Back The Government’s Youth Skills Training Initiative

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2 days ago

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 Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif was visited in Islamabad by a four-person Google delegation led by Mr. Scott Beaumont, President of the APAC area.

Pakistan’s digital economy is about to undergo a revolutionary change, according to the prime minister, who greeted the team. Speaking on the government’s intentions to reach the goal of US$ 25 billion in exports over the next five years, the prime minister revealed that funding will be used for youth training, IT infrastructure upgrades, and regulatory environment enhancements. Pakistan’s economy is being fully digitalised, he remarked. In his attempts, he stressed the need of working together with a tech behemoth like Google.

The Prime Minister praised Google for pioneering projects that have dramatically enhanced the lives of thousands of Pakistanis in recent years, as well as for its involvement in propelling the country’s digital economy closer to reality. Noting with satisfaction that Google has helped Pakistani young land about a million jobs in 2023 alone, the Prime Minister emphasised that this is a testament to both Google’s dedication to upskilling and empowering Pakistan’s youth and Pakistan’s potential in the digital marketplace.

Informing the Prime Minister of its future involvement intentions, Mr. Scott stated that Google has made the decision to support the government’s youth skill-training initiatives and to expand its investment footprint in Pakistan. He went on to say that for a values-driven digital firm like Google, the growing economy and the sizeable youth population are crucial for optimising the economic benefits of technology. He restated that Pakistan’s IT industry will undergo a revolution when five lac Chromebooks are produced there by 2026.

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Google launches the ability to install multiple apps at once through the Play Store.

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5 days ago

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Android users now have the ability to install or update many apps or games at once in the Play Store thanks to a feature introduced by tech giant Google.

Even if Android users downloaded or tried to update several apps or games at once, the prior capability would only process one app at a time.

In the Google Play Store, users can now download or manually update up to three apps or games at once, according to a GSMArena report.

with order to assist Android users with updating or installing multiple apps at once, Google is reportedly already starting to roll out the new feature in a few select locations, including India.

The feature will process three apps at once while sending the fourth to pending when customers install or manually update programs.

When configuring new phones or recovering from a backup, this feature is said to save a tonne of time.

It should be mentioned that Apple has long since permitted customers to download and install up to three iOS apps at once from the App Store.

According to GSMArena, the function is really available on a few cell phones in some regions, even though Google has not formally confirmed when it will appear or whether it will work with any particular handset.

Google started releasing a new AI-powered feature for Android phones a few weeks ago that locks users out of their data to prevent hackers from accessing it.

According to a Forbes story, cellphones running Android 10 or later will soon be able to use the function, which incorporates artificial intelligence.

The anti-theft feature known as “theft detection lock” is currently being rolled out to certain users, according to Mishaal Rahman, who frequently updates his followers on the most recent OS changes on X.

A restricted group of customers who registered for the beta program in Brazil are now receiving theft detection locks, according to Rahman’s post.

Rehman claims that Google Play Services will be used to provide the AI-powered feature to all Android 10 devices.

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Encouraging the IT Sector: Federal Government To Create Nationwide Network Of IT Parks

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6 days ago

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Modern Information Technology Parks will be dotted around the nation by a network established by the federal government.

The goal of the program is to give young professionals a springboard to carry out their creative ideas and support the economy of the country.

The Ministry of Information Technology claims that these parks will increase exports and the IT industry while creating jobs for IT specialists.

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