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A farmer sorts chili peppers at the sorting center of a chili pepper industry park in Shanghu Township of Gao’an City, east China’s Jiangxi Province, Oct. 29, 2025. (Xinhua\/Dai Mingxuan)<\/p>\nA farmer sorts chili peppers at the sorting center of a chili pepper industry park in Shanghu Township of Gao’an City, east China’s Jiangxi Province, Oct. 29, 2025. (Xinhua\/Dai Mingxuan)<\/p>\n
SHANGHAI, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) — Chinese scientists have whipped up an artificial tongue that may say, “Yep, that’s spicy!”<\/p>\n
The gel-based “chili-meter” delivers a quick, exact pungency reading, sparing human taste testers from braving the heat and potentially revolutionizing quality control in the food industry.<\/p>\n
Taking a cue from milk’s ability to soothe a burning palate, researchers at East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) developed a novel bionic tongue by mixing milk powder, acrylic acid, and choline chloride into a soft, flexible gel.<\/p>\n
The mechanism is inspired by the real-world phenomenon in which milk proteins bind to capsaicin — the compound responsible for the heat in chili peppers — thereby reducing the burning sensation, according to a study published in ACS Sensors.<\/p>\n
Likewise, capsaicin latches onto the gel’s milk proteins, swelling into bulky clusters that jam chloride and hydrogen ion traffic. The resulting dip in electric current gives a ready-made ruler for precise heat readings.<\/p>\n
The team “tasted” eight different chili peppers, creating a spiciness scale from 0 (bland) to 70 (extremely spicy). The results were then compared to assessments made by trained human sensory panelists.<\/p>\n
The ranking provided by the artificial tongue closely matched the human consensus, demonstrating its reliability, according to the study.<\/p>\n
This invention could create “a powerful platform for future applications involving movable humanoid robots and portable spicy taste monitoring devices,” the researchers said.\u00a0 \u25a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A farmer sorts chili peppers at the sorting center of a chili pepper industry park in Shanghu Township…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[381,53515,18,19,17,111460,82,111461],"class_list":{"0":"post-202285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-china","9":"tag-cn","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-spicy","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-tongue"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}