Pay with the swipe of finger (so long as it has a pulse)

Futurists have long proclaimed the coming of a cashless society, where euro and credit cards are replaced by fingerprint and retina scanners smart enough to distinguish a living, breathing account holder from an identity thief.

What they probably didn’t see coming was that one such technology would make its debut not in Silicon Valley but at a small college in South Dakota.

Two shops on the School of Mines and Technology campus are performing one of the world’s first experiments in biocryptology — a mix of biometrics (using physical traits for identification) and cryptology (the study of encoding private information).