Redbull: It gives you wild ideas. A Swiss woman is such a fan of Red Bull that she reportedly got the energy drink can’s barcode tattooed on her skin – and it amazingly works at self-checkout ...

Few objects in the world are more immediately recognizable than the barcode—more than 6 billion are scanned every single day. Here’s what to know about their history.

A barcode is an image consisting of a series of parallel black and white lines that, when scanned, relay information about a product.

For example, barcode 4-003994-111000 identifies a box as being a 375 gram pack of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. GS1 is a non-profit organization that assigns unique numbers in barcodes ( here ).

The first modern barcode was scanned 50 years ago this summer—on a 10-pack of chewing gum in a grocery store in Troy, Ohio. Fifty is ancient for most technologies, but barcodes are still going ...

When I began combing through the archive of barcode history at Stony Brook University, I realized just how close we came to a world where we scan bull’s-eye or sun symbols to buy our groceries ...