If you recall, we knew a year ago that Fujitsu was working on a tablet that could scan the palm as a form of authentication, but we've never actually seen a finished product, or even a functioning prototype.

ENGADGET

One case study found that it takes ten days for a bank to process a simple student loan that should take one day, because the bank has to print out the online forms and courier them to the applicant for signatures, then wait for them to be returned by post only to scan them back into digital form.

ECONOMIST: Electronic signatures

The implication of this is that you could scan a person using some advanced form of the technology used to perform MRI scans, and transmit that scanned information somewhere else -- using normal electrical or sound signals -- where it would then be reassembled into an approximation of the original.

CNN: Beam me up: Just how close are we to teleportation?