Monday, February 27, 2012
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Rice bread baking machine a hit for Japan firm
TOKYO (Reuters) – Give us this day our daily bread -- made from rice.
A home breadmaking machine that grinds rice and bakes a loaf of fresh bread at the push of a button has proved such a hit in Japan that its maker, overwhelmed by demand, will temporarily stop taking orders less than three weeks after putting the machine on sale.
Despite a hefty price of around 50,000 yen ($600), Sanyo Electric Co said on Thursday that orders for its Gopan breadmaker were likely to hit 58,000 by the end of the month, its original sales target for the end of March next year.
Though a Sanyo spokeswoman said she thought novelty was behind the machine's popularity, food analyst Hisao Nagayama attributed it to changing eating habits -- a trend toward more Western food and busy lives that make it harder to find the time to cook rice, consumption of which has gone down.
"People can eat the bread easily and it tastes good. But Japanese have been eating rice for thousands of years, so there's something about this bread that's satisfying down to the levels of our DNA," he said.
Users place ordinary washed rice and other ingredients in the Gopan, whose name is a combination of the Japanese for "rice" and "bread," and press the start button. The machine does the rest, from milling the rice to the kneading, rising and baking that other home breadmaking machines also do. Concerns about food safety and allergies are also part of is popularity, Nagayama added.
"There's a lot of people who are getting more nervous about what's in their food, especially things like bread that could contain additives. This allows them to see exactly what goes in."
Sanyo is likely to resume taking orders for the Gopan next April after beefing up production.
Japan has experimented with rice and bread before, most notably the hamburger chain that offers the "rice burger" -- in which a hamburger patty is sandwiched between two halves of a "bun" made out of pressed rice.
A home breadmaking machine that grinds rice and bakes a loaf of fresh bread at the push of a button has proved such a hit in Japan that its maker, overwhelmed by demand, will temporarily stop taking orders less than three weeks after putting the machine on sale.
Despite a hefty price of around 50,000 yen ($600), Sanyo Electric Co said on Thursday that orders for its Gopan breadmaker were likely to hit 58,000 by the end of the month, its original sales target for the end of March next year.
Though a Sanyo spokeswoman said she thought novelty was behind the machine's popularity, food analyst Hisao Nagayama attributed it to changing eating habits -- a trend toward more Western food and busy lives that make it harder to find the time to cook rice, consumption of which has gone down.
"People can eat the bread easily and it tastes good. But Japanese have been eating rice for thousands of years, so there's something about this bread that's satisfying down to the levels of our DNA," he said.
Users place ordinary washed rice and other ingredients in the Gopan, whose name is a combination of the Japanese for "rice" and "bread," and press the start button. The machine does the rest, from milling the rice to the kneading, rising and baking that other home breadmaking machines also do. Concerns about food safety and allergies are also part of is popularity, Nagayama added.
"There's a lot of people who are getting more nervous about what's in their food, especially things like bread that could contain additives. This allows them to see exactly what goes in."
Sanyo is likely to resume taking orders for the Gopan next April after beefing up production.
Japan has experimented with rice and bread before, most notably the hamburger chain that offers the "rice burger" -- in which a hamburger patty is sandwiched between two halves of a "bun" made out of pressed rice.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Without driver or map, vans go from Italy to China
SHANGHAI – Across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert — it certainly was a long way to go without getting lost.
Four driverless electric vans successfully ended an 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo's journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai
Expo on Thursday.
The vehicles, equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles, are part of an experiment aimed at improving road safety and advancing automotive technology.
The sensors on the vehicles enabled them to navigate through wide extremes in road, traffic and weather conditions, while collecting data to be analyzed for further research, in a study sponsored by the European Research Council.
"We didn't know the route, I mean what the roads would have been and if we would have found nice roads, traffic, lots of traffic, medium traffic, crazy drivers or regular drivers, so we encountered the lot," said Isabella Fredriga, a research engineer for the project.
Though the vans were driverless and mapless, they did carry researchers as passengers just in case of emergencies. The experimenters did have to intervene a few times — when the vehicles got snarled in a Moscow traffic jam and to handle toll stations.
The project used no maps, often traveling through remote regions of Siberia and China. At one point, a van stopped to give a hitchhiker a lift.
A computerized artificial vision system dubbed GOLD, for Generic Obstacle and Lane Detector, analyzed the information from the sensors and automatically adjusted the vehicles' speed and direction.
"This steering wheel is controlled by the PC. So the PC sends a command and the steering wheel moves and turns and we can follow the road, follow the curves and avoid obstacles with this," said Alberto Broggi of Vislab at the University of Parma in Italy, the lead researcher for the project.
"The idea here was to travel on a long route, on two different continents, in different states, different weather, different traffic conditions, different infrastructure. Then we can have some huge number of situations to test the system on," he said.
The technology will be used to study ways to complement drivers' abilities. It also could have applications in farming, mining and construction, the researchers said.
The vehicles ran at maximum speeds of 38 miles per hour (60 kilometers per hour) and had to be recharged for eight hours after every two to three hours of driving. At times, it was monotonous and occasionally nerve-racking, inevitably due to human error, Fredriga said.
"There were a few scary moments. Like when the following vehicle bumped into the leading one and that was just because we forgot, we stopped and we forgot to turn the system off," Fredriga said.
Four driverless electric vans successfully ended an 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo's journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai
Expo on Thursday.The vehicles, equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles, are part of an experiment aimed at improving road safety and advancing automotive technology.
The sensors on the vehicles enabled them to navigate through wide extremes in road, traffic and weather conditions, while collecting data to be analyzed for further research, in a study sponsored by the European Research Council.
"We didn't know the route, I mean what the roads would have been and if we would have found nice roads, traffic, lots of traffic, medium traffic, crazy drivers or regular drivers, so we encountered the lot," said Isabella Fredriga, a research engineer for the project.
Though the vans were driverless and mapless, they did carry researchers as passengers just in case of emergencies. The experimenters did have to intervene a few times — when the vehicles got snarled in a Moscow traffic jam and to handle toll stations.
The project used no maps, often traveling through remote regions of Siberia and China. At one point, a van stopped to give a hitchhiker a lift.
A computerized artificial vision system dubbed GOLD, for Generic Obstacle and Lane Detector, analyzed the information from the sensors and automatically adjusted the vehicles' speed and direction.
"This steering wheel is controlled by the PC. So the PC sends a command and the steering wheel moves and turns and we can follow the road, follow the curves and avoid obstacles with this," said Alberto Broggi of Vislab at the University of Parma in Italy, the lead researcher for the project.
"The idea here was to travel on a long route, on two different continents, in different states, different weather, different traffic conditions, different infrastructure. Then we can have some huge number of situations to test the system on," he said.
The technology will be used to study ways to complement drivers' abilities. It also could have applications in farming, mining and construction, the researchers said.
The vehicles ran at maximum speeds of 38 miles per hour (60 kilometers per hour) and had to be recharged for eight hours after every two to three hours of driving. At times, it was monotonous and occasionally nerve-racking, inevitably due to human error, Fredriga said.
"There were a few scary moments. Like when the following vehicle bumped into the leading one and that was just because we forgot, we stopped and we forgot to turn the system off," Fredriga said.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
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