Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2014
From ACM News
How Jean Tirole's Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy
For anyone who has wondered how it’s possible to get so much stuff from web companies free or at too-good-to-be-true prices—whether Google searching, Facebook socializing, Uber riding or Amazon shopping—Jean Tirole, the new Nobel…
From ACM News
Agriculture Is Becoming a 'model Citizen'
New tools not only make farmers' calculations more accurate and their lives less labor-intensive, but also portend of better dissemination of data about agriculture’s impact literally downstream.
From ACM News
Should Industrial Robots Be Able to Hurt Their Human Coworkers?
How much should a robot be allowed to hurt its coworkers?
From ACM TechNews
ltrafast Internet Opens p New Possibilities: Experts
Superfast Internet connections will transform communication and interaction, according to experts polled by the Pew Research Center and Elon University.
From ACM TechNews
Wonder Stuff: Glass That Will Store Your Info For Ever
New meticulously focused lasers are close to enabling a durable transparent material such as glass to serve as a long-term data storage solution.
From ACM TechNews
Homeland Security Funds Software Security Initiative
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has contributed $23.5 million toward an online resource to help test open source programs and improve software analysis tools.
From ACM News
Gravity Map Uncovers Sea-Floor Surprises
s though someone had pulled a plug in the oceans and drained them away, a sea-floor map has exposed thousands of never-before-seen underwater mountains and ridges.
From ACM News
Hadoop Wins Converts Outside Silicon Valley
Two years ago, when the Detroit Crime Commission began collecting and analyzing the social media posts of suspected criminals, it found Excel wasn’t up to the task.
From ACM News
Microsoft's Quantum Mechanics
In 2012, physicists in the Netherlands announced a discovery in particle physics that started chatter about a Nobel Prize.
From ACM Careers
Hackers Gather For Cyberwar in an Intense 48-Hour Sim
Locked Shields is among the world's preeminent cyber attack simulations.
From ACM TechNews
Cyberattacks Trigger Talk of 'hacking Back'
The continuing cyberattacks on U.S. corporate networks is spurring talk among some executives and government officials of going on the offensive, or "hacking back," against those that try to infiltrate their systems.
From ACM TechNews
High-Tech Pay Gap: Minorities Earn Less in Skilled Jobs
Hispanics, Asians, and blacks are not receiving equal pay for equal work in the high-tech industry, according to a recent American Institute for Economic Research report.
From ACM TechNews
Smartphone nderstands Gestures
ETH Zurich researchers have developed an app that enables users to use hand gestures to operate their smartphones.
From ACM TechNews
Lausd Announces Sweeping Expansion of Computer Science Course Work
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and Code.org are collaborating to launch a sweeping expansion of computer science coursework, according to officials.
From ACM TechNews
Tim Berners-Lee, Web Creator, Defends Net Neutrality
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, speaking at a technology conference in London, said harnessing the full potential of the Internet and Web technology in the future will require the codification of network neutrality into law.
From ACM News
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Life in Sharp Focus
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognizes a milestone in a long tradition, dating back to Galileo, of innovations in scientific instruments that have transformed how we look at nature.
From ACM News
Tiny U.s. Region Is Methane 'hot Spot,' Nasa Finds
One small "hot spot" in the U.S. Southwest is responsible for producing the largest concentration of the greenhouse gas methane seen over the United States—more than triple a standard ground-based estimate—according to a new…
From ACM News
How 3-D Printing Is Revolutionizing the Display of Big Data
One of the characteristics of our increasingly information-driven lives is the huge amounts of data being generated about everything from sporting activities and Twitter comments to genetic patterns and disease predictions.
From ACM TechNews
Robotic Solutions Inspired By Plants
The European Union is funding a project that is using plant models to design a robotic solution.
From ACM Opinion
5 Insights from Vint Cerf on Bitcoin, Net Neutrality and More
When Vint Cerf, often called the "father of the Internet," is speaking, it's wise to listen.
From ACM News
Artificial Arms Get Closer to the Real Thing
Powered prosthetic hands and arms have advanced little in the last 50 years.
From ACM News
Found: Closest Link to Eve, Our niversal Ancestor
A man who died in 315 BC in southern Africa is the closest relative yet known to humanity’s common female ancestor—mitochondrial Eve.
From ACM TechNews
A Shiny, New Graph Query System
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers have developed the Graph Engine for Multithreaded Systems program, a multilayer software system for semantic graph databases.
From ACM TechNews
Dynamic Encryption Keeps Secrets
Technical University of Denmark professor Lars Ramkilde Knudsen says he has developed a method for encrypting telephone conversations that makes it very difficult to eavesdrop.
From ACM TechNews
Drop That Beaker
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford universities are promoting massive online laboratories as a way to combat the rising level of errors and fraud in life sciences research.
From ACM TechNews
The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Will Computers Take Your Job?
In the future, intelligent machines will increasingly replace knowledge workers, according to a group of artificial intelligence experts.
From ACM News
Nasa's Nustar Telescope Discovers Shockingly Bright Dead Star
Astronomers have found a pulsating, dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. This is the brightest pulsar—a dense stellar remnant left over from a supernova explosion—ever recorded.
From ACM Careers
The Weather Channel's Secret: Less Weather, More Clickbait
The writers and editors at the Weather Channel's weather.com don’t often talk about the weather.
From ACM News
Large Hadron Collider: The Big Reboot
Mike Lamont grabs the last croissant from a table and eats it as he walks through the control centre at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics just outside Geneva, Switzerland.
From ACM News
Why Astronauts Get the 'space Stupids'
As he was hurtling into orbit, Cosmonaut Gherman Titov had the distinct feeling that his body was cartwheeling through the air.