Vox asks 'Are your fingerprints really unique?'

Today's evergreen content is Vox asking Are your fingerprints really unique?

A new AI tool says it can detect similarities in fingerprints that humans can't.
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Fingerprints have long been known to be completely unique. They also don’t change their pattern over your lifetime, making them an extremely useful biometric for identification. Their uniqueness largely comes from how they form in the womb: as waves of skin cells growing in random patterns of ridges under the top layer of skin in our hands and feet.

Fingerprints are so unique that it is considered impossible to match two different fingerprints from the same person — the only way to know for sure is to match a fingerprint to the exact finger. But a new AI tool developed by students at Columbia University says there are more similarities in intra-person, or same person, fingerprints than we’ve previously known.

Rewatching this video made me realize it has become a missed opportunity, twice. First because it came out too late to show my Human Structure and Function students before I lectured on the integumentary system, which consists of the skin and associated structures, and second because this semester is the last time I plan on teaching the course. I won't have a chance to show it to students next year. Darn.

I do show Why your voice is like a fingerprint, which Kim Mas made and Coleman Lowndes mentioned in the video above.

The features that make your voice unique.
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Most of us use our voices every day to communicate one way or another, but the way we produce sound is so much more than the words we say. Our voices are about as unique as fingerprints — similar instruments, but with endless variations.

As humans, we each essentially produce sound in the same physiological way, but it’s not as simple as plucking a guitar string. And when we talk we’re dropping clues about who we are, what we do, and where we’re from. A dialect can hint where a person is from. An expressive range might suggest a person is a singer or actor. A slow and quiet tone could mean a person is feeling sad or tired. Check out the video above to learn more about the ins and outs of how we produce sounds and why no one else sounds like you.

The students enjoyed this video, which makes me realize how much of a missed opportunity the fingerprints video is. Sigh.

Enough of stories I tell my students. Stay tuned for Tax Day.