Coca Cola in Japan has announced that it has voluntarily been striving to reduce power consumption in its vending machines in an effort to address the power shortages that have affected Japan since the earthquake. They have committed to continuing this effort during Winter.
The effort will run from December 2011 through until March 2012 and will conduct energy saving measures by stopping compressor functions in the peak hours. They will also further reduce power usage by reducing the amount of lighting used on the vending machines on the illuminated models outside during the day and will switch off all lighting 24 hours a day on vending machines that are installed in doors.
A spokesman for Coca Cola Japan said in a press release, "We will consider appropriate measures for other areas while taking into consideration the condition of power provision and the views of local and national governments as well as those of the power companies." It continued, "We have introduced roughly 150,000 heat pumps in the Coca-Cola system, and have been strongly promoting energy saving in vending machines by introducing vending machines that especially reduce energy consumption such as "ecoru/Solar" and "green roof" vending machines."
The heat pump technology mentioned is a technology which actually absorbs the heat from the surrounding atmosphere and converts it into electricity by using a compressor. Effectively, it means that vending machines with heat pumps can use the hot air expelled when cooling products to be used to heat up other warm goods in the vending machine.
Since the announcement, Coca Cola have also decided that starting in 2012 that, wherever possible, new vending machines will have LED lighting for the product displays which use much less energy than standard light bulbs. They are also looking for further ways at producing vending machines that use less energy without compromising the user experience.
It is expected that these new energy saving advances in Japan are likely to be used across the world in all new Coca Cola vending machines as a means of protecting the environment and costing less money to run.
2011年9月29日 星期四
Tevatron Closing: Shutdown Casts Shadow Over Fermilab's Future
In the coming months, the eyes of the physics world will be focused here to see if researchers can confirm the startling findings announced last week in Europe – that subatomic particles called neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light.
But this is also a time of transition for Fermilab. On Friday, physicists will shut down the facility's accelerator called the Tevatron, a once-unrivaled atom smasher that has been eclipsed by the Large Hadron Collider buried beneath the border of France and Switzerland.
For some in Batavia, it will be a somber moment, akin to losing a family member. Others wonder whether it signals a lack of commitment to high-level particle science on U.S. soil.
Fermilab leaders say they hope that's not the case, because there's plenty of research to keep Batavia at the cutting edge.
That point was underscored after researchers using equipment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, revealed their finding that cast doubt on Einstein's theory of relativity.
Fermilab – named after Enrico Fermi, who helped develop atomic energy at the University of Chicago – is one of only two other labs in the world that could try to replicate the work. The other, in Japan, has been slowed by the earthquake and tsunami.
Fermilab saw similar faster-than-light results in 2007 while shooting a beam of neutrinos to a lab in northern Minnesota. But the scientific significance of that observation was undercut by a large margin of error. Now the lab hopes to upgrade its own "clock" to see if it can confirm or debunk the European findings.
But long after the light-speed question has been answered, Fermilab hopes to make neutrino research one of the centerpieces of the post-Tevatron era – and retain its standing as one of the world's premier research labs.
That would involve building a new accelerator to study the universe in a new way – by producing the most collisions, rather than the most powerful. The accelerator also would be capable of producing neutrino beams more intense than anywhere else to help study the particles that scientists theorize helped tip the cosmic scales toward a universe made of matter.
"The idea is to look for things that happen very rarely, and the way to find them is to create lots of examples and see if you find something," said Steve Holmes, who's in charge of the new venture, called Project X.
But this is also a time of transition for Fermilab. On Friday, physicists will shut down the facility's accelerator called the Tevatron, a once-unrivaled atom smasher that has been eclipsed by the Large Hadron Collider buried beneath the border of France and Switzerland.
For some in Batavia, it will be a somber moment, akin to losing a family member. Others wonder whether it signals a lack of commitment to high-level particle science on U.S. soil.
Fermilab leaders say they hope that's not the case, because there's plenty of research to keep Batavia at the cutting edge.
That point was underscored after researchers using equipment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, revealed their finding that cast doubt on Einstein's theory of relativity.
Fermilab – named after Enrico Fermi, who helped develop atomic energy at the University of Chicago – is one of only two other labs in the world that could try to replicate the work. The other, in Japan, has been slowed by the earthquake and tsunami.
Fermilab saw similar faster-than-light results in 2007 while shooting a beam of neutrinos to a lab in northern Minnesota. But the scientific significance of that observation was undercut by a large margin of error. Now the lab hopes to upgrade its own "clock" to see if it can confirm or debunk the European findings.
But long after the light-speed question has been answered, Fermilab hopes to make neutrino research one of the centerpieces of the post-Tevatron era – and retain its standing as one of the world's premier research labs.
That would involve building a new accelerator to study the universe in a new way – by producing the most collisions, rather than the most powerful. The accelerator also would be capable of producing neutrino beams more intense than anywhere else to help study the particles that scientists theorize helped tip the cosmic scales toward a universe made of matter.
"The idea is to look for things that happen very rarely, and the way to find them is to create lots of examples and see if you find something," said Steve Holmes, who's in charge of the new venture, called Project X.
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