laundry

Who needs to go to a restaurant to have a great meal when you could have one made for you at home?

That's the idea behind KitchIt, a Silicon Valley startup that is hoping to use technology, smart and easy design, and good culinary industry connections to offer everyday people custom restaurant-quality meals at home at affordable prices.

The concept is simple: To use KitchIt, you go to its Web site, enter your city, the date and type of the dinner you're planning, how many people are in your party, and the price range per diner.

Once you'… Read more

NEW YORK--I'm standing in the middle of America's foodie mecca, and I've found a smoking gun that helps explains its incredible success.

I mean that literally.

This is the kitchen of world-class chef Thomas Keller's Per Se, his Michelin three-star restaurant located on Columbus Circle, and the smoke is flowing freely, rapidly filling up a plastic container and helping to give the cream inside some additional flavor.

I mentioned this was the Smoking Gun, a culinary tool from PolyScience, right?

I've come here to Per Se because a friend told me he'd had a … Read more

If you hate folding laundry, you might like what you see in a recent video from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. They programmed a robot to fold towels.

The researchers used Willow Garage's PR2, a general-purpose humanoid robot with two seven-axis arms and a wheeled base. In an ICRA 2010 paper, they present a cloth-grasping algorithm for getting the robot to pick up and fold towels it hadn't previously analyzed.

Fitted with four stereo cameras, PR2 was able to successfully figure out, grasp, and fold 50 single towels, as well as a pile of five … Read more

I certainly don't go out of my way to buy hand-washable clothing, but there are those items you don't want to just toss into the machine. For those special garments, the laundry room sink doesn't always get the job done properly: either you soak the item and don't get it thoroughly clean, or you scrub it by hand and risk damaging it.

The Jentle Jet sink from MTI Whirlpools provides a new solution: three micro-jets that let you properly clean delicate hand-washables. Only jetted water touches the garments, and you can regulate the speed from a … Read more

A recently married co-worker told me that what's even worse than having to do laundry is when your significant other complains that you don't enjoy doing it. I'm single and didn't really know what he was talking about. However, now there's something to help do the laundry that I think I would really enjoy, and it comes from South Korea.

According to the Korea Times, scientists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology have created a domestic robot that can help with the laundry and even heat up food in the microwave.

The scientist says that the robot, called "Mahru-Z," is a human-like machine with arms, legs, a rotating head, and it has the capability to "see" objects in three dimensions and recognize chores that need to be done. This is amazing for a machine of just taller than 4 feet and weighing about 120 pounds. I am 6 foot tall and often find myself not knowing what to do standing right in the middle of a messy room.

KIST engineers say that Mahru-Z can use its moving hands, elbows, and six fingers to pick up a dirty shirt, throw it into a washing machine, and push the buttons to get the laundry done. Oh, that may be it--I have only five fingers.

Other than working autonomously, Mahru-Z can also work with its fellow maid robot, Marhu-M, an earlier KIST creation that moves on wheels. Mahru-Z can, for example, put fruit in a basket while Mahru-M, which has the advantage in mobility, can locate the owner and bring him the basket directly.

Both machines can be controlled remotely through a computer server.… Read more

Many years ago, my husband told me he didn't like the way I folded his shirts. "You sound like a man who wants to fold his own shirts," I told him, and ever since then, he has held the title of Official Laundry Folder in our home.

Now that we have five children, we generate the amount of laundry you might expect to see in a small country. And since our oldest children are 8 and 10, we'd like to put them to work. Their folding skills may be lacking, but I've already claimed that … Read more

My freshman year of college, I lived on the third floor of my dorm. The laundry room, of course, was in the basement. I definitely got a lot of exercise running up and down the stairs, checking for empty machines, checking if my machine was done, or checking if my clothes were still there.

Kids these days just don't know how good they have it, especially if they have eSuds, a new technology that is changing the entire experience of public laundry facilities. When a facility installs eSuds, users can then use any Internet-connected computer to check real-time machine … Read more

Just a cup of water and a bit of detergent. That's all that needs to be added to a virtually waterless washing machine from British company Xeros that's poised to hit the North American market.

The dirty job is done by small nylon beads that pull stains off garments and lock them into the nylon's molecular structure. The beads don't even seem to suffocate easily--they can continue to absorb dirt over hundreds of washes.

The technology builds on research out of the U.K.'s University of Leeds and has been applied in a concept washing … Read more

So, sometimes I admit things out loud that I'm sure makes other people hate me--such as when my cleaning lady does the laundry, she uses too much soap. It makes me crazy. I know, I know, the heart bleeds, right? But at the end of the day (at least Tuesdays), half a box of laundry detergent is gone with only two or three loads of clean clothes to show for it.

Purex has developed a new concept in laundry room management: Complete 3-in-1 laundry sheets with a load's worth of detergent, softener, and static protection all in one … Read more