By  jeff goldman 
 
Jan 17, 2007__The Register's Bill Ray reports that Somark Innovations "has successfully tested an RFID tattoo on cows, mice and rats, enabling an identifying number embedded under the skin to be read from over a meter away."

Unlike expensive RFID chips that are often implanted in pets or stapled to farm animals' ears, Ray says the new system "uses an array of needles to quickly inject a pattern of dots into each animal, with the pattern changing for each injection. This pattern can then be read from over a meter away using a proprietary reader operating at high frequency."

"Somark are in the process of raising money to exploit the technology, and point out that what works for animals can, of course, also work for people, identifying military personnel as one of their secondary markets after cattle and other livestock," Ray writes.

"Co-founder Mark Pydynowski declines to say what is in its ink, except that it doesn't contain metals and is 100% biocompatible and chemically inert," writes TechWeb's K.C. Jones. "That could let ranchers and meat buyers use stamps to verify that select cuts of meat originated in a hormone-free environment, Pydynowski says, adding that consumers would destroy the system by breaking down the ink when chewing the meat."

source:  www.wireless-weblog.com