Kenneth Suslick of the University of Illinois and others have been working on a groundbreaking technology which would allow you to taste food without using your tongues in the real sense. They are working on what is being touted as the artificial tongue.

The world’s first electronic tongue converts the chemical properties of what we eat into a visual image which gets translated into taste in the brain, thanks to all the receptors. The results are apparently 100% accurate and the artificial tongue can identify the 6 natural tastes and also hundreds of sub-tastes or variations in the taste. This would allow you to know how a certain dish or food tastes before actually putting inside your mouth.

These tastes would be tasted by robots, and could very well be the first step in creating a robot that “tastes”. Imagine if the robot can soon “feel” and they can anyway “hear” and “see” already. So we shall soon have robots that would empty all the five senses known to man. It is weird, but such electronic sense organs can change the way we lead our lives.

Via: Wired