Filed under: Household, Robots

It might not look too fancy, but China’s first cooking robot, cleverly named “AICookingrobot” or AIC for short, can manage Sichuan, Shandong and Canton cuisines, with a repertory of thousands of dishes. Four years in development, AIC cost 2 million yuan to build — about $253,000 US — and will supposedly help “standardize Chinese fast food.” The bot mimics the actions of those lame-o human chefs that are always asking for “raises,” “bathroom breaks” and “sleep,” and was recently demonstrated on Sunday cooking “beautifully-flavored, attractive-looking shrimp” in five minutes. We’re not quite sure how far the talents of the bot reach, since we know the bot can fry, bake, boil and steam stuff, but there’s no word on chopping or measuring or other minor details like that. Still, the AIC — which will go on sale in 2007 and even should reach the home in the not-so-distant future — is clearly a pre-cursor to the day when we can all sit back with our Nintendo DS-based cooking simulators while all the real work gets done by a Chinese cookbot in the kitchen. What a world that will be.

[Via Robot Gossip]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Filed under: Household

If sporting a TV / microwave hybrid is too embarrassing for guests to see, or you just need one more completely extravagant household item to brag about, Dacor’s got you covered. Its latest offering takes the conventional convention oven and relocates it away from the wall or countertop, and into a dwelling area most usually inhabited by silverware and Saran wrap. The Millennia microwave in-a-drawer was apparently engineered to be installed under a counter, in a kitchen island, or essentially any location where having a microwave would look thoroughly gauche. The 1.0 cubic foot cooker sports 950 watts of roasting power, defrost, reheat, and popcorn modes, 11 power levels, child lockout, automatic shutdown sensors, a timer function, and a nifty “one-touch” sliding door. While we aren’t sure what this (presumably costly) device will run you, nor how much of your kitchen you’ll ravage while installing it, you’ll have the rest of the year to weigh your options and decide how important kitchen aesthetics really are to you.

[Via Gizmag]

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SPONSORED BY: BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time.

Filed under: Laptops

Alright, so maybe you didn’t want such a warm welcome when using your MacBook, but the list of unadvertised capabilities of these heat-emitting notebooks is growing. Most recently a pioneering fellow decided he liked his eggs over hard — hard drive, that is. While his MacBook was operating within the manufacturer’s specifications (read: likely folding for Engadget or some other such process-intensive task), the underbelly of this beast got toasty enough to literally fry an egg. While probably not the most efficient way to fix breakfast, it’s definitely among the most entertaining we’ve seen, and certainly helps substantiate the, ahem, smoking reviews this machine got.

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Filed under: Household

No amount of hours spent in front of Iron Chef and Good Eats will a good chef make, friends, but perhaps one might consider the employment of one MIT Media Lab experiment by Connie Cheng and Leonardo Bonanni: the Intelligent Spoon. This, um, intelligent spoon has zinc, gold, zener diode, and aluminum sensors to detect the temperature, acidity, salinity, and viscosity levels of the human-feed it's currently stirring, which it then sends back to a host computer for processing and direction. We're not sure this would help us to add a certain subtlety or trans-cultural flavor adaptation to the sweetbreads we were planning on whipping up tonight, but it might just do the trick in keeping you from over-salting that pancake mix on a Saturday morning.

[Via The Raw Feed]