This cute little snowman survived a 5,314 mile (around 8000 km) journey from Japan to the desert of Bahrain without any refrigeration. The only things keeping him alive in his cardboard box were some new vacuum insulation panels designed by Panasonic. Basically, the folks at Panasonic had this clever new product sitting around and needed a way to show it off when they just happened to get "a message on their Facebook page from a Bahraini girl named Amna al-Haddad, who wanted her younger brother Saleh to see snow for the first time." So they did the logical thing: They made a mold out of reinforced styrofoam and shoveled heaps of snow into it - about 70 quarts' worth - packing it tightly to form a rotund snowman. They put the mold in a cardboard box and covered it with Panasonic's U-Vacua insulation, which has a glass core enveloped by a plastic-metal composite foil. Then they slapped a "Snowman Inside" sticker onto the 225-pound box and off it went. You can see the happy results in the video below.<object height="417" width="500"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3FM6OAIyWZM&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1"/></param><param name="wmode" value="window"/><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3FM6OAIyWZM&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="opaque" height="417" width="500"></embed></object>[Gizmodo][EcoIdeas @ Panasonic] Permalink | Leave a comment  »
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