The death of the plastic credit card could be a step closer as high street names including McDonald's and the Co-op prepare to test a breakthrough finger-scanning payment technology.

FingoPay, developed by British start-up Sthaler, uses a biometric reader to scan the veins of a shopper’s finger, building up a “map” that is unique to each individual.

By connecting this pattern with a credit card or bank account, the company plans to let shoppers pay simply by placing their finger in a pocket-sized scanner, doing away with cash and credit cards.

Sthaler, founded by former music industry executive Nick Dryden, will begin testing the technology next month in Proud, a London nightclub. Mr. Dryden said McDonald's is experimenting with a pilot of the technology, and that Sthaler is also planning a project with Co-op’s food stores.

It comes amid growing interest in using biometric identification in payments, which backers believe are more secure and efficient than passwords and PINs. Apple Pay, which uses the iPhone’s fingerprint technology, launched in the UK in 2015 and was followed by the Android equivalent in May 2016.

Hendrik Kleinsmiede, the director of Visa Europe’s innovation arm Collab, which is backing Sthaler, said the Fingopay technology was less immune to problems such as wet and dusty fingers or fraud. “People are ready to accept biometrics as a secure authentication mechanism,” he said.

Sthaler says the chance that two people have the same vein structure is 3.4bn-to-one, making it virtually impossible to crack. The vein scanner, developed by Hitachi, is already being used by Barclays to identify business customers as well as in cash machines in Japan, but Sthaler has the unique rights to license it to retailers.

In the trial at Proud set to begin in September, the technology will be used to speed up waiting times at the bar both by cutting down on cards and by being able to suggest drinks based on what a patron has previously ordered.

Are you sick of going to bed late and waking up tired? Then grab your hiking boots and a tent. A new study suggests that camping in the great outdoors for a couple of days can reset your body clock and help you get more sleep.

The body clock is an internal system that tells our bodies when it’s time to go to sleep and when it's time to wake up. Scientists track this clock by measuring the amount of melatonin (褪黑激素) circulating in a person’s blood at any given time.

In a healthy sleeper, melatonin levels rise a few hours before bedtime, stay high through the night, and then settle back down when it’s time to wake up.

In our modern society, however, most of us stay up many hours past sunset and would probably sleep in many hours after sunrise if we could. And the trouble is, your melatonin levels may still be high when your alarm clock goes off in the morning, which leads to fatigue. It may also have other health consequences as well, such as diabetes (糖尿病), overweight and heart disease.

Professor Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado in the US wanted to see if our body clocks can be reset by a short stay in nature. His team recruited (招募) fourteen physically active volunteers in their 20s and 30s. Nine went on a weekend camping trip, while the other five stayed home. At the end of the weekend, the researchers reported that in just two days, the campers’ body clocks had shifted so that their melatonin levels began to rise more than an hour earlier than they did before they left on the trip. By contrast, the body clocks of the group that stayed home shifted even later over the course of the weekend.

“This tells us we can reset our clocks fast,” Wright said.

Therefore, if you want to change your sleep patterns you could try to increase your exposure to natural light during the day and decrease the amount of artificial light you see at night. And if that doesn’t work，there’s always camping.

Nowhere is the place you never want to go. It’s not on any departure board, and though some people like to travel so far off the motherland that it looks like Nowhere, most wanderers ultimately long to get somewhere. Yet every now and then—if there’s nowhere else you can be and all other options have gone—going nowhere can prove the best adventure around.

Nowhere is entirely uncharted; you’ve never read a guidebook entry on it or followed others’ suggestions on a train ride through its suburbs. Few YouTube videos exist of it. Moreover, it’s free from the most dangerous kind of luggage, expectation. Knowing nothing of a place in advance opens us up to a high energy we seldom encounter while walking around Paris or Kyoto with a list of the 10 things we want—or, in embarrassing truth, feel we need—to see.

I’ll never forget a bright January morning when I landed in San Francisco from Santa Barbara, just in time to see my connecting flight to Osaka take off. I hurried to the nearest airline counter to ask for help, and was told that I would have to wait 24 hours, at my own expense, for the next day’s flight. An unanticipated delay is exactly what nobody wants on his schedule. The airline didn’t answer for fog-related delays, a gate agent declared, and no alternative flights were available.

Millbrae, California, the drive-through town that encircles San Francisco’s airport, was a mystery to me. With one of the world’s most beautiful cities only 40 minutes to the north, and the unofficial center of the world, Silicon Valley, 27 miles to the south, Millbrae is known mostly as a place to fly away from, at high speed.

It was a cloudless, warm afternoon as a shuttle bus deposited me in Millbrae. Locals were taking their dogs for walks along the bay while couples wandered hand in hand beside an expanse of blue that, in San Francisco, would have been crowded with people and official “attractions.” I checked in to my hotel and registered.

Suddenly I was enjoying a luxury I never allow myself, even on vacation: a whole day free. And as I made my way back to my hotel, lights began to come on in the hills of Millbrae, and I realized I had never seen a sight half so lovely in glamorous, industrial Osaka. Its neighbor Kyoto is attractive, but it attracts 50 million visitors a year.

Who knows if I’ll ever visit Millbrae again? But I’m confident that Nowhere will slip into my schedule many times more. No place, after all, is uninteresting to the interested eye. Nowhere is so far off the map that its smallest beauties are a discovery.