Don’t take a licking from spicy food.

A team of researchers in China claims to have created an artificial “tongue” that can quickly detect spice levels in their food — and they used a well-known gustatory hack to do it.

The taste-testing device resembles a small, transparent square of soft gel that the consumer places on their tongue — ready to taste-test meals before diners dive in.

A team of researchers in China created a small transparent square of soft gel that can quickly detect spice levels. Weijun Deng, adapted from ACS Se / SWNS

“Our flexible artificial tongue holds tremendous potential in spicy sensation estimation for portable taste-monitoring devices, movable humanoid robots, or patients with sensory impairments like ageusia, for example,” Weijun Deng, the study’s lead auth

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