New research says your ears are like snowflakes—completely unique in the world. Which is neat! But also means you have two giant finger prints on the side of your face, and airport security wants a look.
A team at the University of Southampton hopes that ear scanning, unlike facial biometrics, will allow security teams to track travelers as they age—bypassing the wrinkles and general facial lumpiness we all acquire with time. "Your ears...age very gracefully. They grow proportionally larger and your lobe gets a bit more elongated, but otherwise your ears are fully formed from birth," explains the team's leader. An ear-based scanning system would only require two cameras that would snap shots as you handed over your passport—letting a computer do the rest of the work. [Telegraph]