Article
New Scientist reported on a Motorola patent application describing cellphones that could relay emergency alerts to each other over a peer-to-peer network even when most of a cellular network is down, addressing the fact that many people miss broadcast warnings because their TV or radio is switched off. Under the proposed system, a phone still within range of a cell signal receives an alert and passes it on to the nearest phone using Wi-Fi, which then does the same, spreading the warning across a disaster area with minimal reliance on damaged infrastructure.