A new artificial tongue is better than the real thing when it comes to sensing subtle differences in sweeteners, including the many natural and artificial variations used in beverages, cakes, cookies and chewing gum.

About the size of a business card, the sweetness sensor works by detecting pH changes when a sweet substance mixes with a derivative of the chemical boric acid.

"We take things that smell or taste and convert their chemical properties into a visual image," chemist Kenneth Suslick of the University of Illinois said in a press release. "This is the first practical 'electronic tongue' sensor that you can simply dip into a sample and identify the source of sweetness based on its color."

Several other groups have attempted to create electronic tongues, but artificial tasters usually have trouble distinguishing between similar chemical flavors, especially in a complex mixture. For instance, one rogue robot mixed up the flavor of the human hand with prosciutto. (Or perhaps we just taste like ham ... it's hard to know.)

The new sensor identified 14 kinds of natural and artificial sweeteners with 100 percent accuracy in 80 different trials. __"__Actually, our sensor is much better at telling the difference between sweeteners than humans," wrote Suslick in an e-mail. The researchers presented their findings Monday at the American Chemical Society meeting in Washington D.C.

According to Suslick, the artificial tongue could eventually replace human tasters in the food industry. "For routine quality control," he wrote, "our device might be a substantial improvement, because one wants to compare to a known standard." But there are some functions that a robot taster will never be able to fulfill, he said: "For use in formulations (e.g., new recipes), there is no substitute for the human tongue, because after all, that's what the consumer actually uses!"

Image: Results show the artificial tongue's analysis of six common natural and artificial sweeteners.

Courtesy Kenneth Suslick/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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