February 28, 20253 min readA New Device Lets You Taste Things without Actually Eating ThemThis tiny instrument lets users taste thingswithout actually eating themby releasing a combination of chemicals that reconstruct different tastes. But replicating associated smells and textures will take some timeBy Gayoung Lee edited by Andrea ThompsonA new technology could allow us to taste food by biting down on a tiny, cubelike device Sieto/Getty ImagesImagine youre virtually walking through a forest during the Mesozoic era, when dinosaurs roamed Earth. As you pass some shrubs, you notice strange-looking fruit with a label that reads, Taste a Stegosauruss Favorite Food! So you reach into your pocket, grab a small cube attached to a thin plastic strip and hold the strip between your teeth. Immediately, your tongue is filled with a sweet-and-sour tang.This kind of experience might be realized in the not-too-distant future, according to a new study published on Friday in Science Advances. Immersive technologies such as virtual or augmented reality already do a pretty good job of reconstructing visual and auditory elements of experiences that can transcend space and time. But the developers of e-Tastea tiny cube, measuring about 15 millimeters (0.6 inch) on each side, that is filled with electric sensorswanted to add taste to the available repertoire of virtual senses.Images of e-Taste, a new device capable of simulating five different tastes by releasing a combination of chemicals to replicate the taste of a food object.Chen et al., Science Advances, Vol. 11, eadr4797 (2025)On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.For users, the way e-Taste works is simple. You hold the strip in your mouth, with the cube dangling outside. When the sensors inside the cube detects a food object (for example, the Stegosauruss Favorite Food) in the virtual environment, e-Taste releases a combination of chemicals that simulate five different tastessalty, sour, sweet, bitter and umamireplicating the experience of taste without requiring you to actually eat anything. Inside, the cube has small, refillable packs of liquid chemicals that are combined in different amounts to produce specific tastes. In the case of the imaginary fruit, for example, glucose and citric acid would be used.The role of taste in virtual realities has been relatively underexplored because taste is not just tasteit comes with other stuff like smell and texture, says study co-author Yizhen Jia, an engineer at the Ohio State University. To be clear, e-Taste cant yet replicate smell or texture, although Jia and his colleagues have already started exploring ways to include those elements. We do have a more [improved] design thats currently in progress, Jia says, and then also another work thats trying to address smell. But they researchers are confident that they are off to a good start, he adds, because e-Taste demonstrates it is possible to imitate tasting experiences in a compact, flexible way without a very bulky, large device.Even as it is now, however, e-Taste represents a significant advance in biomimetics, or the field in which researchers create artificial copies of natural systems to solve human problems, says Tae-il Kim, a bioengineer at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, who was not involved in the new study. One important objective of bioengineering is to develop technologies that work seamlessly with our bodies, as if they were a part of us, Kim explains. For instance, certain concepts behind e-Taste, such as emulating our tongues sensory functions and quantifying taste in chemical terms, could have extensive medical applicationssuch as wearable devices that people could use to make daily checks for health-related abnormalities. Such a device could perhaps stimulate different parts of the tongue to, say, determine if the brain was processing sensory signals properly.Photos showing the size of the electromagnetic actuator, which the user mounts onto the teeth.Chen et al., Science Advances, Vol. 11, eadr4797 (2025)Certainly, all this is still speculation, Kim says, but it does demonstrate the kind of advances bioengineers have been able to make in recent years. The end goal for [bioengineers] is not just to stop at making exact replicas of nature but also to understand why something works the way it does, he says. Thats how we make technology that people not only want but also actually needfor example, by improving accessibility. Its all part of that long-time quest.