Sony Recalls 1.6 Million Bravia TVs Because They're Worried They'll Catch Fire [Sony]

By Adrian Covert Oct 12, 2011 8:43 AM 9,053 25

If you bought a Sony TV between 2007 and 2008, it might be a fire hazard! Since 2008, 11 people have claimed their Bravia TVs caught on fire, prompting Sony to now recall 1.6 million TVs.

According to Bloomberg, the problem traces back to a transformer component that's been used in a handful Bravia models.

A faulty component in the backlight systems may be the source of overheating that can melt the top of the television, Shima said. The same transformer is used in the five Bravia models in Japan being recalled, according to a Sony statement.

There haven't been any reports of overheating incidents outside Japan, the statement said.

Additionally, the website Product Reviews lists the 8 models which are affected:

Here's the important information to note, as the model numbers associated with the affected televisions include the KDL-40D3400, KDL-40D3500, KDL-40D3550, KDL-40D3660, KDL-40V3000, KDL-40W3000, KDL-40X3000 and KDL-40X3500 models.

Beware, TV watchers. [Bloomberg, Product Reviews]

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Apple Sells One Million iPhone 4Ses In 24 Hours [Iphone 4s]

By Jesus Diaz Oct 10, 2011 9:02 AM 15,649 119

Apple has officially announced that they have sold one million iPhone 4S units in 24 hours, which beats down the previous 600,000-unit record set by the iPhone 4. Insane. Phil Schiller is "blown away":

We are blown away with the incredible customer response to iPhone 4S The first day pre-orders for iPhone 4S have been the most for any new product that Apple has ever launched and we are thrilled that customers love iPhone 4S as much as we do.

I'm sure you are Phil, I'm sure you are. [Apple]

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How Chicago Purifies One Million Gallons of Water Every Minute [Video]

How do you slake the thirst of 5.5 million Chicagoans spread throughout the country's third largest city and 118 surrounding suburbs? You treat one billion gallons of water a day at the world's largest water treatment plant.

Opened in 1968, the James W. Jardine Water Purification Plant provides virtually all of Chicago's potable water, though the smaller South Water Purification Plant also helps provide for the south end of the city. The process begins 2.5 miles off shore at massive in-flow points called cribs. Each crib pulls water from 20 feet below the surface down a 168-foot vertical shaft to tubes cut from the bedrock which flow back to the shore. Once it reaches the plant, fish and other large debris are filtered out using a rotating screen and the water is pumped 25 feet up to begin the gravity-powered treatment process.

The water is first chemically treated with chlorine to kill microbes and activated carbon to remove objectionable tastes and odors, then fluoride is added for healthier teeth, and finally aluminum sulfate about an hour into the process to increase the stickiness of microscopic solids which then adhere to each other, creating floc. Large paddles—floculators—assist with the mixing of alum and water. One of the very last chemicals added, polyphosphate, is used to coat the inside of Chicago's pipes, preventing the lead in old plumbing from leaching into the water supply. The water is then pumped into settling tanks where the floc sinks to the bottom. This sedimentation phase eliminates roughly 90 percent of the particulate matter from the water.

The water is then filtered in one of 96 swimming pool-sized tanks filled with a layer of coarse gravel under an upper layer of fine sand—together these layers effectively filter much of the remaining floc and debris from the water. The entire process from crib to filtration takes eight hours. From here, the water is pumped through 4,000 miles of pipe for consumption by the Chicago area's 5.5 million residents.

[Me Magazine - Algor - Water Purification Wiki - Jardine Water Purification Plant Wiki]

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How To Raise Four Million Pounds of Fish a Year—in Virginia [Monster Machines]

The demand for seafood in America is booming, to be sure—unfortunately, the ocean's fish stocks aren't exactly doing the same. So how does one meet this overwhelming demand for meat? Farming fish, obviously. Lots of them.

Recirculating Aquaculture, How Does It Work?

Recirculating Aquaculture is a four-step system, starting in the grow-out tanks that house the fish population. Water is continually pumped through these tanks, introducing food and carrying away waste. Once water exits the tanks, it's first mechanically filtered, whereby fecal matter and food particles are removed. The water is then cycled past beneficial bacterial cultures that convert the ammonia present in the water to harmless nitrogen vapor that's released into the atmosphere. Before being pumped back into the tanks, the water undergoes oxygenation by having pure O2 pumped into the flow and any carbon dioxide removed.

The accumulated waste can then be reused—often, as an aquaponic fertilizer (which conveniently filters the water for reuse) or in methane digesters to generate electricity. There is even research underway in using the waste for bio-fuel production. By continuously filtering the fouled water and reintroducing the clean, RA systems are able to raise large amounts of fish with minimal "water footprints." For example, BRA is able to continuously recycle about 99.75 percent of the water flowing through its 100,000 square foot facility.

Having a small footprint is a boon to the burgeoning inland aquaculture industry for both fresh and salt-water species. BRA's complex sits on just 2.5 acres of land but raises four million pounds of tilapia protein each year—that's between 10,00 and 20,000 pounds a day. If they were raising cattle on the same acreage, they'd produce maybe 10,000 pounds in the same period.

BRA, for example, raises its Tilapia from proprietary brood stock, harvesting 400,000 to 500,000 eggs every week. When the Tilapia hatch, the fry are first raised in a series of nursery tanks before being transferred to one of the facility's 42, 35,000-gallon grow-out tanks with the rest of the population. Through the larval and juvenile stages, and until they're nine months later when they weigh 1.5 pounds, they exist in an entirely closed system. The kicker is that each fish lives on just 1.5 gallons of water apiece—that's a lot of fish for such a small area. If you packed cattle into conditions like that, you'd have to pump them full of antibiotics and growth hormones to overcome their physiological response to the over-crowding—but not with tilapia. Packing them in like Sardines actually makes the fish less aggressive, less territorial, and even improves their growth rate. And by maintaining this closed system, the fish remain free of industrial pollutants and other nasty things—like Mercury—that's found in wild populations.

This closed system also offers significant benefits over the current offshore aquaculture "net pen" farms used to raise salt water species. Basically, their super-concentrated populations tend to release super-concentrated waste—the equivalent to dumping the raw sewage from a town of several thousand directly offshore. In addition, these fish are not only more prone to infection from their over-crowded conditions, they're more likely to spread these afflictions to neighboring wild species.

Recirculating aquaculture was initially created specifically with fresh-water species in mind, recent advancements are showing promise in raising certain saltwater species in the same fashion. The secret is to use very low salinity water. Typical net pens have a salinity of 35 parts per thousand, however Australian RAS firms have successfully raised both Pompano and Combia (both rather expensive when raised offshore or caught from wild stock) in tanks with a salinity of only five ppt. This has obvious benefits for both the RAS industry and the environment itself—resulting in a wider selection of fish to raise while virtually eliminating the waste, disease, and nutrient runoff issues present in offshore farms. And while these systems aren't ready for commercialization just yet—researchers still need to tack down every aspect of the fish's life cycle from the optimal temperature to maximize hatching to the proper amount of dissolved nitrogen necessary, to the best food to feed at each stage of life—this technique promises major benefits over current methods.

[USDA - Blue Ridge Aquaculture - Lancaster Farming - Blue Ridge Aquaculture.pdf - Wikipedia - CS Monitor - Top Image: AP Images]

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A 5-Year-Old Girl Dug Up a 160 Million Year Old Fossil [Science]

Emily Baldry, an adorable 5-year-old girl from the UK, was doing what a normal kid her age would be doing: Hanging out at with her family and digging. Unlike other normal kids though, she found a 160 million year old fossil. She called it Spike.

It's an absolutely amazing and rare discovery that happened by complete chance: Emily was just using a plastic spade to dig around on her first organized digging trip at Cotsworld Water Park in the UK with her dad. Little did she know what would come out of it: the Rieneckia odysseus fossil—which is like a gigantic mollusk from the Jurrasic period—16-inches in diameter and completely intact, other fossilized ammonites in the UK have all been fragmented into little pieces.

Emily actually made the discovery last year (so she's now 6) but only got to see Spike this past week because geologists had to restore the fossil (it originally looked like a mud block). Emily was thankful for that and said:

It is so exciting to see him. I was very happy when I first saw him and now he looks very shiny.

I hope she keeps digging. [Daily Mail]

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Why Would a Company Spend $200 Million to Build a 20-Mile Ghost Town for 35,000 Invisible People? [Cities]

New Mexico, where people go to cook Crystal Meth and disappear into the maw that isn't quite Mexico, is going to get another claim to fame: a brand new, $200 million 20-square mile city with no residents. A modern day ghost town.

It could fit 35,000 people if people were allowed to live there but that's not the point for this ghost town. Instead, the purpose is to let anyone test anything on a city wide scale without the interference of nosy citizens. Think of it as one gigantic lab, only it'll have highways, houses, old buildings, new buildings instead of coats and beakers.

The ghost town, which they refer to as The Center, is the brain child of Pegasus Global Holdings, a Washington DC-based company. There won't be any people living at The Center but other companies can see how their solar panels play out on a larger scale, how new traffic systems work in real life simulations, how Wi-Fi will translate between old and new buildings and so much more. It's an actual blank slate city to manipulate however they'd like. A playground for research.

The Center is supposed to be the first of its kind 'round the US and will be finalized in the next few months. I wonder how quick it'll transform to a squatter town though. [Washington Post, Image Credit: upthebanner/Shutterstock]

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Starz Turned Down $300 Million to Stay on Netflix [Video]

So you know how Starz and Netflix broke up, which, sad! But did you further know that Netflix offered up a whopping $300 million per year to make the third-rate movie channel stay? That's ten times their current deal. Yowza.

Starz, according to the LA Times, refused to sign off on any deal that didn't involved a tiered pricing plan. That way the movie network could save face with its cable cronies while still making bank on Netflix streaming. Nice try, Starz! But also not a negotiation so much as a round of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Netflix, obviously, refused to adjust its pricing, which is in the long-run a hopeful sign for consumers. And that's how we got here: come March, you're going to have to live without streaming second-tier first-run movies Tangled and The Expendables. And Starz is going to have to live without hundreds of millions of dollars. [LA Times]

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The $40 Million Delivery Blimp [Airships]

The Ice Road Truckers may soon have themselves some competition if Canadian specialty aviation company, Discovery Air, has its way. They want to deliver supplies to the Great White North's most remote locales via dirigible by 2014.

Discovery Air and Hybrid Air Vehicles have announced plans to launch a commercial Heavy Lift Air Vehicle service serving mining camps and secluded villages in the Northwest Territory using airships originally developed for long-term reconnaissance by the US military.

These hybrid aircraft—"hybrid" in that they use both the lift from non-flammable Helium and the aerodynamics of the ship to stay aloft—employs laminated fabric covering an internal catenary system as the hull. The airships will be able to carry up to 50 tons of cargo as a time and will purportedly be able to land or take off from virtually anywhere—thanks to its four propulsion fans.

"The North has been waiting a long time for a year-round, heavy-lift, transport capability." Dr. Barry Prentice, Professor of Supply Chain Management at the Asper School of Business in Winnipeg, Manitoba, stated. "The conditions are right for a new form of transport that is capable of heavy lift, but is also low cost and environmentally sustainable."

These blimps will be able to travel up to 115mph (185km/h) without the dangers of an overland route. They will, on the other hand, run about $40 million apiece.

[CBC News via Ubergizmo via MobileMag - HAV Press Release - Discovery Air Press Release]

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This Clock Won't Be Late for Another Ten Million Years, Give or Take [Time]

That hunk of metal to the right is the world's most accurate clock, say people with more knowledge of time and atomic clocks than anyone else.

Called a cesium fountain clock (aka atomic clock), this British ticker is accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second and won't lose a second for the next ten million years or more. I hope someone is around to wind it at that time, otherwise things could get awkward when our bioconstruct kin are zipping around with their FTL drives and arrive in Alpha Centauri a full second late.

Back on Earth, on our side of the pond, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which last reported an accuracy/uncertainty of 3 x 10-16. That's about 100 million years between losing or gaining a second to the layman. I'll take one for my wrist, please. [CNET]

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