The technology sounds somewhat similar to Tripit, which organizes travel information by scanning email itineraries.

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But instead it rewards and reinforces our ways of reading: our ingrained habits of consuming images, scanning information, reducing human experience to pannable nuggets of gold.

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It rewards a 21st century audience accustomed to scanning mounds of digital information and quickly categorizing that information into familiar frames of reference.

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Ramzam says that identity thieves frequently test credit card information by moving small sums of money, and banks have responded by scanning transactions records looking for unusual recipients of what look like test transactions.

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By scanning the brains of people while they learned from positive and negative information about the future we uncovered a possible answer to this puzzle.

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Terahertz light - which lies between infrared light like that used by remote controls and the microwaves in the appliance of the same name - has become popular in scanning technology at airports and museums' back rooms because it can extract information without risk of damage.

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Maris imagines UPS deliverymen scanning and delivering packages with just a glance, nurses at hospitals receiving real-time information on patients without having to stop what they're doing and, indeed, patients with limited mobility having greater access to the world of information themselves.

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