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Robot whiskey tongue lashes back at hooch hustlers

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Geekz Snow
Robot whiskey tongue lashes back at hooch hustlers

Leave it to the Scots to crack down on crooked scotch.

In a bid to stop the trade of counterfeit alcohol, scientists at the University of Glasgow have created an artificial tongue to taste-test different types of whiskey.

In a release from the university's School of Engineering, lead paper author Dr Alasdair Clark noted that while this isn't the first artificial tongue, his team is the first to incorporate two different types of nanoscale metal tastebuds.

"We call this an artificial tongue because it acts similarly to a human tongue – like us, it can't identify the individual chemicals which make coffee taste different to apple juice, but it can easily tell the difference between these complex chemical mixtures," Clark said.

Using subatomic slices of gold and aluminum to test the tipples, the research team created tastebuds 500 times smaller than a human's which were then able to successfully identify differences between drinks with greater than 99% accuracy.

The tongue even had enough taste to tell the difference between a Glenfiddich 12-year whiskey and an 18-year bottle.

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