CBS News | Caffeine High Tech | April 15, 2004 "This baby won’t be on the market for another six weeks or so, but we’re going to put our order in today.

It’s a microwave oven that’s actually got a brain. Thanks to those same UPC symbols that made the supermarket checkout lines go faster twenty years ago, this oven takes all (ok, most) of the guesswork out of microwave cooking. You simply pick up the scanning wand attached to the front of the oven and scan the UPC of whatever it is you want to cook. If it matches one of the 4,000 items stored in the microwave’s memory, the proper cooking time and settings will appear in the LCD window. All you have to do is hit “start” (after you take the food out of its box, and put it in the oven).

If what you’re cooking isn’t in the memory, you can teach the oven how long to cook it, and store it for the next time you scan that same item. It’s so easy, it’s scary."