But the idea is far from dead. How about if governments started using RFID to issue automated ticket violations? As part of a project called ASSET-Road, VTT Technical Research Center in Finland, has developed RFID license plate tracking. The project began in 2008 and will wrap in June, 2011. VTT attempts to detect traffic congestion but it also achieved the goal of "traffic violations detected in a flash." And then Arizona-based camera vendor American Traffic Solutions (ATS) expanded upon that RFID technology by developing automated tailgating tickets as a feature that can soon be added to existing speed camera programs. Now add in this bit of info: There are also drivers licenses that "come equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be read right through a wallet, pocket or purse from as far away as 30 feet."

Along similar lines is a company using RFID to track employees. An Indian company, Unity Infraprojects, uses RFID employee tags to keep track of so-called "ghost workers." The only way an employee gets paid is by a combination of RFID evidence and physical presence to collect daily payment.

A new RFID product, "guarantees that RFID will follow you straight to your grave." The palm-size stone tablet has an RFID tag that talks with mobile phones to direct users to an Internet memorial archive. And such uses for RFID are only the tip of the iceberg. Thing Magic, a company that builds embedded RFID readers, recently launched 100 Uses of RFID. 

Location-aware apps are scary enough, based on GPS with the broad range they offer. But for the most part you still have to sign up for those. RFID is being implemented all around you. It has slowly been moving to mainstream. It can track infants to senior citizens with Alzheimer's. In between it can track your clothes, your purchases, your car - even you. RFID is on the verge of tracking us all, cradle to the grave.

Lookout, a smartphone security firm based in San Francisco, scanned nearly 300,000 free applications for Apple's iPhone and phones built around Google's Android software. It found that many of them secretly pull sensitive data off users' phones and ship them off to third parties without notification.

The data can include full details about users' contacts, their pictures, text messages and internet and search histories. The third parties can include advertisers and companies that analyse data on users.

The information is used by companies to target ads and learn more about their users. The danger, though, is that the data can become vulnerable to hacking and used in identity theft if the third party isn't careful about securing the information.

Lookout found that nearly a quarter of the iPhone apps and almost half the Android apps contained software code that contained those capabilities.

Australian online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman Colin Jacobs said the issue of applications spying on their users "was something that everybody needs to be aware of". Jacobs said that many did not think of their phone as a computer. "Mobiles contain as much personal information as people's everyday computers do," he said.

Virtually all climate research in peer-reviewed science journals predicts global temperatures will gradually rise by several degrees in coming decades, accompanied by swings of extreme cold and heat.

"But just because we've seen a large evolutionary response, that doesn't mean a natural population can adapt to climate change with no consequences," Barrett told AFP Thursday.

About 95 per cent of the fish population died during the three-year study, with only five per cent developing a tolerance for cold," he said. "The consequences of losing 95 per cent might be catastrophic, because the remaining five per cent might not be able to sustain the population," said Barrett. He added: "We don't know the genetic basis of this trait."

The rapid evolution by the marine fish in the study mirrored the 10,000-year-long evolution of freshwater stickleback in British Columbia - descendants of marine fish trapped inland at the end of the last Ice Age, who evolved to live in extreme cold.

Barrett noted that humans also evolved over some 10,000 generations, since their first migration from Africa, raising the question of how many generations it might take for northern peoples to evolve genes that could cope with warmer climates experienced by their African ancestors."You can start to draw a parallel in evolutionary rates," said Barrett.