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A refrigerator of the future that tells you what to cook with your leftovers and automatically re-orders fresh food is being designed in the UK.
The self-cleaning "refrigerator of the future" will automatically place supermarket home delivery orders when required and move food near its use by date to the front of the shelves.
Researchers hope the fridge could clean itself, cut down on wasted food and offer up recipes - which could be tailored to different countries, cuisines and seasons.
With Brits putting in 36 million hours every year of free overtime - leaving little time for household chores - the refrigerator could help save precious time during hectic modern-day lives.
These new developments are in the pipeline thanks to collaborations between scientists at the University of Central Lancashire and online supermarket Ocado.
The planned new features include the ability for refrigerators to scan their shelves to see what is in stock and use this information to both plan meals and automatically place a supermarket food order.
The smart fridge will use "nano-articulated technology" shelf surfaces which, whilst smooth to the touch, will have millions of independently controlled micro-tiles which will manoeuvre products which soon need to be eaten to the front of the refrigerator.
Ultrasound-scanning technology built into the door will allow the refrigerator to "swipe and capture" the food on a plate before and after mealtime, meaning it can assess what type and amount of food is wasted.
Dr Simon Somerville, an expert from the University of Central Lancashire, said: "Cookbooks are essentially inventory lists of food items. To this end the most available information that the refrigerator will have is a set of permutations that allow a set number of ingredients to produce a large number of quite different dishes. The key concept in the successful implementation of this process is accurate inventory tracking."
參考譯文：
英國正在研制一種未來冰箱，它可以告訴你如何用剩菜做出美味佳肴，而且還可以根據新鮮程度自動調整食物的擺放順序。
這種自潔式“未來冰箱”會自動下訂單讓超市送貨上門，還會把接近保質期的食物放在擱架的最前面。
研究人員希望這種冰箱可以自動清潔、減少食物浪費并提供食譜—能夠滿足不同國家、不同烹飪方法、不同季節(jié)的需求。
由于英國人每年都得為加班犧牲3600萬個小時的閑暇時間，幾乎沒有時間做家務，這種冰箱可以幫助人們在繁忙的現(xiàn)代生活中節(jié)省寶貴的時間。
英國中蘭開夏大學的科學家與網上"奧卡多"超市目前正在聯(lián)合開發(fā)未來冰箱。
按照計劃，未來冰箱的新特點包括能夠掃描擱架上的食物、清點庫存，利用這些信息安排晚餐，并自動創(chuàng)建一份超市食物訂單。
這種智能冰箱的擱架表面將采用“納米合成技術”，由數(shù)百萬獨立控制的微型瓷磚組成，手感細膩平滑，可把必須盡快食用的食物挪到冰箱擱架最前面。
冰箱門所采用的超聲波掃描技術可使冰箱在餐前和餐后“捕捉”盤子里的食物，這就意味著它可以對被浪費的食物的種類和數(shù)量做出評估。
中蘭開夏大學專家西蒙.薩默維爾博士指出：“菜譜從本質上說是一份食品的存庫清單。這樣說來，未來冰箱的信息系統(tǒng)可對所有食材進行排列組合，用有限的原料做出許多不同的菜肴。成功執(zhí)行這一程序的關鍵在于精確的庫存跟蹤。”
