It sounds like a scenario straight out of a sci-fi movie. But researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh have developed a new light detection system that can recognise human faces and objects from more than half a mile away – even at night or through smoke or fog. Scientists say the ground-breaking research could be a'step change' for security and defence and has the potential to'make identification significantly easier'. Using pulses of laser light to measure the distances to objects, the system can construct'high-resolution 3D images' of faces and other surfaces from as far away as ten football pitches in both daylight and darkness. Dr Aongus McCarthy, an optical scientist and research fellow at Heriot-Watt's Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences, said: 'If someone is standing behind camouflage netting, this system has the potential to determine whether they are on their mobile phone, holding something, or just standing there idle.'

Pigs can recognise whether they are looking at the front or back of a human head using key features like our mouths and noses as cues. In visual tasks, the animals were able to pick out whether they were looking at someone's face or the back of their head with up to 80 per cent accuracy. Scientists said their paper shows pigs have better visual-based memory and intelligence than previous studies suggest. Pigs can recognise whether they are looking at the front or back of a human head using key features like our mouths and noses as cues. In the first of two studies from researchers at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Austria, two groups of pigs were trained to discriminate between the front and back of the heads of ten people via photos on a computer screen.