Researchers at BHU develop a novel method for testing milk using evaporation at home

Milk is important for our health, but news reports make us wonder if it's safe. Milk adulteration with chemicals can cause serious health problems. We need to be sure we're drinking pure milk. Milk is popular, so some sellers make fake milk that looks real. This fake milk might have water, soap, and oil in it, not healthy things like real milk.

Studied by BHU

Scientists in India made a new, easy, and cheap way to test milk for added substances. This protects people's health and helps ensure milk is pure. The method involves letting a drop of milk dry and using a special computer program to analyse the pattern left behind.

A simple way to test a substance is by letting a drop dry and looking at the ring it leaves behind. Different materials leave different ring patterns, like fingerprints. Scientists used this method to check if milk was real. They made fake milk in a lab, then mixed it with real milk in different amounts. By looking at the fake milk's dried ring patterns, they could tell how much real milk was present.

Looking at the dried milk residue can tell you how good the milk is. If there are multiple rings, tiny oil droplets, or clear patches, it might mean the milk has been mixed with something else. The clearer the dried milk, the more likely it's been tampered with.

Ways to do home testing? 

This technique offers a straightforward, at-home method for evaluating milk quality. Put a drop of milk on a glass slide with a medical syringe and let it evaporate. Take a picture of the vanishing patterns with the camera on your smartphone. The presence of the aforementioned indicators in the vanishing patterns on the glass slide verifies that artificial milk has been mixed with real milk.

The machine-learning model was trained and validated using the combined evaporated ring patterns of water and synthetic milk during the experiment for large-scale analysis. Throughout the trial, the model identified water-mixed milk with 95.8 percent accuracy and both pure and synthetic milk with 96.7 percent accuracy.