{"id":154973,"date":"2025-11-27T03:09:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T03:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/154973\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T03:09:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T03:09:09","slug":"chinese-scientists-develop-artificial-tongue-to-measure-spiciness-xinhua","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/154973\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese scientists develop artificial tongue to measure spiciness-Xinhua"},"content":{"rendered":"

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>\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":154974,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1657,31271,85,46,93861,125,20648],"class_list":["post-154973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-china","tag-cn","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-spicy","tag-technology","tag-tongue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154973\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}