Stop chewing your credit cards.
Researchers in Japan have managed to carve tiny numbers and pictures into a fingernail, in the form of microscopic dots burnt into the nail by laser.
The team has only managed the feat on nail clippings so far, but they hope the process could one day be used to securely carry information on live fingertips. It might even replace credit cards, they suggest, although you’d have to get your information carved in every six months or so as the nail grows out.
Yoshio Hayasaki of the University of Tokushima and colleagues say a single fingernail could accommodate something like 800 kilobytes of data. That won’t provide room for a high-resolution photo, but would be enough to store basic identification information.
