![\"Whisky](\"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Screenshot-2019-08-06-at-06.08.06.png\")
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Who else but Scottish engineers would think of using an artificial tongue to differentiate between whiskies? A new paper published in the Royal Society of Chemistry\u2019s journal <\/span>Nanoscale<\/span><\/i>\u00a0describe how they built the tiny taster, which exploits the optical properties of gold and aluminium to test the tipples.<\/span><\/p>\n Dr Alasdair Clark, of the University of Glasgow\u2019s School of Engineering, is the paper\u2019s lead author. <\/span>\u201cWe\u2019re not the first researchers to make an artificial tongue,” he says, “but we\u2019re the first to make a single artificial tongue that uses two different types of nanoscale metal \u2018tastebuds\u2019, which provides more information about the \u2018taste\u2019 of each sample and allows a faster and more accurate response.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhile we\u2019ve focused on whisky in this experiment, the artificial tongue could easily be used to \u2018taste\u2019 virtually any liquid, which means it could be used for a wide variety of applications. In addition to its obvious potential for use in identifying counterfeit alcohols, it could be used in food safety testing, quality control, security \u2013 really any area where a portable, reusable method of tasting would be useful.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>The paper, titled \u2018Whisky tasting using a bimetallic nanoplasmonic tongue\u2019, is published in Nanoscale. <\/i><\/span>The reusable optical tongue\u2019s multiplexed gold and aluminium nano-arrays arranged in a checkerboard pattern act as the \u2018tastebuds\u2019 in the team\u2019s artificial tongue, a bimetallic device which produces two distinct resonance peaks for each sensing region. Through specific modification of these arrays with orthogonal surface chemistries, such a dual-resonance device could halve sensor sizes and data-acquisition times when compared to single-resonance, monometallic devices.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The researchers poured samples of whisky over the tastebuds \u2013 which are about 500 times smaller than their human equivalents \u2013 and measured how they absorb light while submerged. <\/span><\/i>Statistical analysis of the very subtle differences in how the metals in the artificial tongue absorb light – what scientists call their plasmonic resonance \u2013 allowed the team to identify different types of whiskies.<\/span><\/p>\n Surface chemistry combinations used: (i) native Al, Au (ii) Al-HMDS, Au-DT, and (iii) Al-PEG, Au-PFDT.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/span>The team used the tongue to sample a selection of whiskies from Glenfiddich, Glen Marnoch and Laphroaig.\u00a0<\/span>The tongue was able to taste the differences between the drinks with greater than >99.7% accuracy by means of linear discriminant analysis (LDA). It was capable of picking up on the subtler distinctions between the same whisky aged in different barrels, and tell the difference between the same whisky aged for 12, 15 and 18 years.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>Dr Clark said: \u201cWe call this an artificial tongue because it acts similarly to a human tongue \u2013 like us, it can\u2019t identify the individual chemicals which make coffee taste different to apple juice but it can easily tell the difference between these complex chemical mixtures.<\/span><\/p>\n The research, which was conducted by engineers and chemists from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, was supported by funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.<\/span><\/p>\n Only very small samples are required for the testing. We have no information on what happened to the leftover whisky.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who else but Scottish engineers would think of using an artificial tongue to differentiate between whiskies? A new paper published in the Royal Society of Chemistry\u2019s journal Nanoscale\u00a0describe how they built the tiny…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":8589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,58,47,9],"tags":[884],"class_list":["post-8588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-science","category-chemistry","category-innovation","category-technology","tag-whisky"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8591,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8588\/revisions\/8591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Tongue](\"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Screenshot-2019-08-06-at-05.54.36.png\")
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