An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Guardian: Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords. “We sometimes call it the invisible biometric, ” said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field. Those companies have helped enter more than 65M voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. … The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where the mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As they make their way up and down the field chasing the ball, the players on this new soccer pitch in Rio de Janeiro are actually helping to keep the lights powered when the sun sets. Because underneath the artificial turf are 200 special tiles that work like tiny generators to harness the kinetic energy of the players and turn it into electricity. Read more… 
What if the sweat produced by your body could power your gadgets? And what if the connection between the two could be made by a temporary tattoo, the more you sweat, the more power the tattoo generates? That’s exactly what researchers at UC San Diego have developed—and one day, it could power your wearables. Read more…