Drinks manufacturers and consumers may soon have a small, portable kit, not much bigger than a covid test, to check the quality and safety of alcoholic beverages. The device is being described as an "artificial tongue" because it can detect additives, toxins and the sweetness of the drink with just a few drops. Shuo Huang at Nanjing University in China says that while this first generation of the new technology can't yet test for date rape drugs in spiked drinks or detect methanol contamination, which recently resulted in the deaths of six backpackers in Laos, future versions may. Current methods for analysing alcoholic drinks, such as liquid chromatography, involve expensive and cumbersome laboratory equipment, requiring expert technicians to operate and analyse samples. The artificial tongue relies on biological nanopore technology.

Picking out the differences between high-end whiskeys might be easy for a seasoned Scotch drinker, but until recently, this skill eluded artificial systems. Now researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed an artificial tongue capable of distinguishing between drams of Glen-fiddich, Glen Marnoch, and Laphroaig whiskeys with 99% accuracy. The "tongue" itself consists of tiny gold receptors that measure just 100 nanometers across, or approximately one-thousandth the width of a human hair. When exposed to a liquid, the receptors change color. The researchers measure and track the changes across multiple receptors, then build up a statistical model of a given liquid's attributes.

AI that can generate new flavor combinations from scratch is nothing novel, but what about models that can taste those flavors like a human? In a recently published paper ("A portable potentiometric electronic tongue leveraging smartphone and cloud platforms") and an accompanying blog post, researchers at IBM's Zurich-based R&D division detailed Hypertaste, an artificial tongue designed to fingerprint beverages and other liquids "less fit for ingestion." Such a system could be used to guarantee supply chain safety for food and drinks, proposed IBM research staff member Patrick Ruch, who noted that there's currently little to verify that packages contain what's on the label apart from conducting costly experiments. Suppliers acting in bad faith could insert lower-quality products into the supply chain, while counterfeiters could fake a real product by adding the few chemical compounds which are most likely to be tested for in a lab. "There are many substances out there that we would like to'taste' without actually putting them in our mouth. Consider a government agency interested in an on-the-fly water quality check of a lake or river at a remote location, a manufacturer wanting to verify the origin of raw materials, or a food producer trying to identify counterfeit wines or whiskeys," wrote Ruch.

While many tech firms are working to develop drones to carry goods, one firm believes a giant ball may be more suitable. FreeMotionHandling is a sphere-shaped autonomous vehicle filled with helium that can suck up objects using a'tongue'. The firm says it can pick ups and drop off items up to 400g. While many tech firms work to develop clunky drones to carry goods, one has designed a sphere-shaped autonomous vehicle filled with helium that sucks up objects. It uses an adaptive drive system to thrust itself in directions of rotation and craters for'dynamic flying behavior in all spatial direction. To get from one place to another, FreeMotionHandling uses and indoor tracking system of 10 infrared cameras.