Voice recognition has been on the forefront for many years; genetic fingerprinting is standard use while now nearly all surfaces of common products can be recognized by a phenomenon called laser speckle. Wikipedia describes it as “a random intensity pattern produced by the mutual interference of coherent wavefronts that are subject to phase differences and/or intensity fluctuations”. As I learned last week, this doesn’t seem to be random but influenced by surface characteristics, see the video of the laser surface authentication technology (LSA) at the Bayer website. As far as I could trace it, the technology has been invented by Russel Cowburn, made its way to Ingenia Technology Limited (ITL) and is now hosted at Bayer and branded as ProteXXion(R). Surface characteristics can be stored in a 750 Bytes string; objects are recognised at a speed of up to 5 m/s. No fake products anymore – I would like to have such a reader also for living cells …