This is

This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagliata.

Got a minute?

Biometric technology was once the stuff of sci-fi.

How many movies show someone having their hand or eye scanned to get entry into a secured

facility.

But today, biometric tech can be found in millions of people's pockets, as the fingerprint scanner

on an iPhone.

Of course, fingerprint scanning isn't foolproof.

Hackers have stolen fingerprints from photos

and use fake prints to fool Apple's touch ID.

Plus, there's always the brute force method,

like the time a gang in Malaysia cut off a guy's finger tip

with a machete to interface with the fingerprint recognition system

on the victim's Mercedes.

But there is a lesser known biometric that might be a bit harder to counterfeit,

brain waves.

In the biometric textbook table of contents, often the brain biometrics were listed as esoteric biometrics.

So I guess people have thought about it for many years,

but it's been considered sort of esoteric.

Sarah Lasslow, a psychologist at Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York.

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