4 | NewScientist | 3 May 2014

BRAIN chips mean we struggle to distinguish our own thoughts from ideas implanted by advertisers. Self-driving cars restrict old-school human drivers to special recreation parks. And the optimal number of fingers is 12.5. Confused? This is a vision of the world in 25 years – and the issues facing future researchers in computer-human interaction (CHI).

Last week, attendees at the CHI conference in Toronto, Canada, created an imaginary conference

agenda for 2039, to explore the direction of computing (bit.ly/CHI2039). “There’s a lot of retrospective thinking about the past, but there’s not as much thinking about the futures toward which we think we’re working,” says Eric Baumer of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who dreamed up the

BIG may not necessarily mean better if Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, buys the UK’s AstraZeneca (AZ).

The announcement that the company is to pursue AZ, despite being rebuffed in January, comes a week after Swiss firm Novartis and GSK of the UK swapped assets. The deal strengthened Novartis’s position in cancer drug development and reinforced GSK’s dominance in vaccines. By contrast, there seems to be less

PER-

AN

DER

S PE

TTE

RSS

ON

/GET

TY

Cyborgs of 2039 Mega pharma

UPFRONT

“A study of people who have added on bionic fingers concluded that 12.5 is the optimal finger count”

future conference idea. Other highlights included “My

liver and my kidney compared notes”, in which IBM researcher Michael Muller studied what happens when the implanted monitors on people’s organs talk to each other and offer health tips based on their pooled knowledge.

On a similar theme, Bill Tomlinson at the University of California at Irvine and colleagues described crops that talk to each other through a Facebook-like interface and learn from what grows well and where.

Meanwhile, a team led by Johannes Schöning of Hasselt University in Germany described an imagined study of people who have chosen to augment their hands with bionic fingers. “The optimal finger count is 12.5, with six normal-sized fingers on each hand and the dominant hand having an extra half-sized finger that can be moved with 6 degrees of freedom,” they concluded.

Not all these futures will happen, says Baumer: “It’s meant to be sort of the fringes of human-computer interaction research, what’s really edgy or provocative.”

scope for Pfizer to become a world leader by gobbling up AZ’s assets, says John Carroll from the online industry bulletin, FierceBiotech, because neither is dominant in fields where they overlap.

There is little hope that pharma megadeals will do much for neglected medicines, such as antibiotics and drugs for tropical diseases. Companies are also shying away from areas like depression. “People don’t fully understand the biology, there are high failure rates, and large placebo effects,” says Carroll.

Death penalty under fireAMERICAN prisons are desperate to

find alternative ways to kill their death

row inmates. A shortage of the drugs

that are typically used for capital

punishment has sparked a fevered

search for alternatives, even as fresh

concerns have emerged about the

number of people on death row who

have been wrongly convicted.

At least one in 25 of the people

who are sentenced to death in the

US is innocent, according to a study

of 7482 death row inmates. Between

1973 and 2004, 116 (1.6 per cent) of

these inmates were exonerated, but

this number doesn’t reflect the true

rate of false convictions, says Samuel

Gross of the University of Michigan in

Ann Arbor, who led the study. About

one-third of all these inmates had

their sentences commuted to a lesser

sentence, which sometimes happens

when there is doubt about a prisoner’s

guilt. Because of this and other

factors, the researchers conclude that

the number of inmates wrongfully

sentenced to death is likely to be

about 307, or 4.1 per cent (PNAS, doi.

org/sj5). Gross says this figure could

be comparable to the rate of wrongful

conviction for other violent crimes.

Lethal-injection drugs are in

short supply because the European

manufacturers refuse to sell them,

leaving states scrambling for fixes.

Deborah Denno of Fordham University

in New York examined more than 300

cases from the past six years in which

states modified the drugs used for

lethal injection. She concluded that

the changes are often made hastily,

and without sufficient oversight.

-A man on death row in Texas-

Warhol art found on floppy discsIT’S Andy Warhol’s iconic soup cans

as you have never seen them before.

A computer club has rediscovered

digital versions of the cans (pictured)

plus other art that Warhol created

on an Amiga computer in 1985.

The club, based at Carnegie

Mellon University in Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, freed the works from

floppy discs that were held at The

Andy Warhol Museum’s archives

from 1994 and had been inaccessible

due to their obsolete format. The

university club is well known for its

collection of out-of-date hardware

and retro software design skills.

The rescue came about after artist

Cory Arcangel spotted a YouTube

video of Warhol painting Blondie

singer Debbie Harry at an Amiga

launch in 1985. That inspired him

to ask about the fate of the rest

of Warhol’s digital experiments.

Warhol’s original work was

commissioned by Commodore, the

maker of the much-loved Amiga.