The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
The question of whether there is life on Mars is woven into a much larger thatch of mysteries. Among them: What happened to the ancient ocean that once covered a quarter of the planet’s surface? And, relatedly, what made Mars’s…
New alternatives will further disrupt the payment cards market.
Data scientist–a job that barely existed a decade ago–has become one of the hottest and best-paid professions in the U.S.
Silicon Valley companies say they’ve been preparing for yesterday's European Court of Justice decision invalidating the U.S.-Europe Safe Harbor agreement on data transfers.
A virtual assistant developed at Cardiff University recently had its first public trial at the BBC's Make It Digital event.
The swipe--without actually needing to touch a screen with a finger--will be the next dominant computer interface method, according to researchers in Germany.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are developing a computer system that uses multiple types of data to help predict the effects of disease on brain anatomy.
Boeing and Carnegie Mellon University have launched an Aerospace Data Analytics Lab to mine insights from the vast body of data generated by the aerospace industry.
A new project aims to develop a computer that reads scientific papers, derives data on biochemical pathways, and plugs it into large-scale interactive models.
The University of Maryland's Autonomy, Robotics, and Cognition Lab is developing robots that can learn how to do a new job by watching others do it first.
At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Catharine A. Conley has a lofty job title: planetary protection officer.
What can humans learn from dragonflies?
Many Americans buying new cars these days are baffled by a torrent of new safety technology.
Researchers at Jeppiaar Engineering College in Chennai, India, have developed a biometric keystroke algorithm that learns how the user types.
A new machine learning-based search engine could benefit scientists in the life and medical sciences.
Researchers relied on density functional theory calculations and the dynamical mean field theory technique to calculate the electronic structure of plutonium.
When fictional astronaut Mark Watney becomes stranded alone on the Red Planet in the novel and film "The Martian," people and technology from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, play important roles in his…
How the new field of cloud robotics will impact intelligent machines.
Europe's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has struck down the 15-year-old Safe Harbour agreement that allowed the free flow of information between the US and EU.
Nobel Prize speculation, gossip, and betting pools kick off every fall around the time Thomson Reuters releases its predictions for science's most prestigious prize. This year, one prediction was unusual: a genome-editing tool…
When the digital currency Bitcoin came to life in January 2009, it was noticed by almost no one apart from the handful of programmers who followed cryptography discussion groups.
Researchers have developed a new method to train computers to recognize and comprehend a wide range of human activities in a single day.
A researcher discusses a report issued earlier this year on how individuals' Facebook activities could be used to measure their psychological profiles.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers plan to present a machine-learning technique that enables semantically-related concepts to reinforce each other.
Worchester Polytechnic Institute researchers have demonstrated how to use an instance of Amazon EC2 to recover the full 2,048-bit RSA key from a separate Amazon instance.
A University of California, Santa Cruz researcher has developed a smartphone app that helps visually-impaired users handle their photos.
The Botivist program uses Twitter to rally people to social causes, thanks to the efforts of Saiph Savage and colleagues at West Virginia University.
Researchers at Stockholm University researcher are developing a Biosphere Code Manifesto.
It can take weeks to reprogram an industrial robot to perform a complicated new task, which makes retooling a modern manufacturing line painfully expensive and slow.
When NASA scientists announced that instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sensed signs of liquid water seeping on the Martian surface, they meant a solution salty enough to kill most living things on Earth.