There's two different artificial tongues here, and one synthetic person.
Work begins to create artificial human DNA from scratch
Jun 2025, BBC
"If we manage to create synthetic body parts or even synthetic people, then who owns them. And who owns the data from these creations? "
You heard it folks, synthetic people. Your job here is done. You can leave now.
Graphene-based artificial tongue achieves near-human-like sense of taste
Jul 2025, phys.org
Here's some words: "neuromorphic artificial gustation"
via Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Nanosystem and Hierarchical Fabrication in Beijing: Yuchun Zhang et al, Confinement of ions within graphene oxide membranes enables neuromorphic artificial gustation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2413060122
Image credit: no credit actually, because we don't really do that anymore
Research highlights unreliable responses from most Amazon MTurk users, except for 'master' workers
Jul 2025, phys.org
This sounds like a major meta-problem in behavioral and psychological research science. I wonder for example how serious was the BISEP issue in genetics? (I see articles from 2016 saying 1 in 5 papers could be messed up, and similar articles all the way up to 2023, but no really in-depth investigations into what this means for genetics science as a whole.)
Back to the MechaTurks
"The implication is that their responses to the main questionnaire may be equally random."1,300 participants answered identical questionnaire items to measure response consistency, and "attentional catch" questions that should be easily answered."It's hard to trust the data of someone who claims a runner isn't tired after completing a marathon in extremely hot weather or that a cancer diagnosis would make someone glad"The findings: The majority of participants from MTurk's general worker pool failed the attention checks and demonstrated highly inconsistent responses, even when the sample was limited to users with a 95% or higher approval rating.
via Bar-Ilan University: Assessing the quality and reliability of the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) data in 2024, Royal Society Open Science (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.250361.
Artificial tongue uses milk to determine heat level in spicy foods
Oct 2025, phys.org
Yeah just artificial tongue.
via Shanghai Institute of Technology: A Soft and Flexible Artificial Tongue for Pungency Perception, ACS Sensors (2025). DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.5c01329
China's unemployed young adults who are pretending to have jobs
Aug 2025, BBC News
Shui Zhou, 30, had a food business venture that failed in 2024. In April of this year, he started to pay 30 yuan ($4.20; £3.10) per day to go into a mock-up office run by a business called Pretend To Work Company, in the city of Dongguan, 114 km (71 miles) north of Hong Kong.There he joins five "colleagues" who are doing the same thing."I feel very happy. It's like we're working together as a group."And rather than attendees just sitting around, they can use the computers to search for jobs, or to try to launch their own start-up businesses. Sometimes the daily fee, usually between 30 and 50 yuan, includes lunch, snacks and drinks.
A ripe target for identity thieves: Prisoners on death row
May 2025, NBC News
Death Row inmates are unlikely to receive communications that would alert them to identity theft.
via identity verification company SentiLink:
Celsius energy drink cans filled with vodka in production mishap
Jul 2025, BBC News
The mix-up came about after a packaging supplier mistakenly shipped empty Celsius cans to the vodka seltzer company High Noon, which filled them with alcohol.
AI-generated voices now indistinguishable from real human voices
Sep 2025, phys.org
As we pass the inflection point, an interesting phenomenon occurs where being real isn't even real enough anymore - "hyperreal" - some studies show AI-generated faces are judged to be human more often than real human faces.
via Queen Mary, University of London: Voice clones sound realistic but not (yet) hyperrealistic, PLOS One (2025). dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0332692
Detection firm finds 82% of herbal remedy books on Amazon ‘likely written’ by AI
Oct 2025, The Guardian
Some topics are faker than others, that's all.
Hundreds of animal studies on brain damage after stroke flagged for problematic images
Oct 2025, phys.org
After noticing suspicious images in some papers in mid-2023, they set out to perform a systematic investigation of image-related problems in all 608 potentially relevant publications. The researchers uncovered that 243 papers (40%) were found to be problematic, most often for containing problematic images.
via Radboud University Medical Center: Aquarius R, et al. High prevalence of articles with image-related problems in animal studies of subarachnoid hemorrhage and low rates of correction by publishers.PLOS Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003438
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