Airport Security Might Soon Be Scanning Your Ears

New research says your ears are like snowflakes – completely unique in the world. Which is neat! But it also means you have two giant fingerprints 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 travellers 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]