Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2015
From ACM Careers
Why Organism Engineering Could Be a Foodie's Dream Come True
Thanks to recent advances in synthetic biology—a hybrid discipline of engineering and biology that makes possible the manipulation of DNA of microorganisms such as yeast, bacteria, fungi and algae a new generation of "organism…
From ACM News
Augmented Reality Gets to Work—and Gets Past the 'glassholes'
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that has been on the cusp of becoming the next big thing for over 20 years.
From ACM Careers
Why Kevin Mitnick, the World's Most Notorious Hacker, Is Still Breaking Into Computers
Look no further than Kevin Mitnick's business card to see how some things never change.
From ACM TechNews
New Stanford Manufacturing Process Could Yield Better Solar Cells, Faster Chips
Stanford University researchers have developed a manufacturing process that could significantly reduce the cost of producing gallium arsenide devices.
From ACM TechNews
Iarpa Preps Insider Threat-Monitoring Projects
The U.S. intelligence community wants to develop insider threat-monitoring systems and new techniques for predicting cyberattacks.
From ACM TechNews
Self-Powered Sensors That Communicate Could Warn of Bridge, Building Defects
Researchers are developing technology that would enable a bridge, dam, or building to sense a defect and alert officials before something bad occurs.
From ACM News
One Thousand Genes You Could Live Without
Researchers have unveiled the largest ever set of full genomes from a single population: Iceland.
From ACM TechNews
Cooperative Software Framework Helps Tame 'too Big' Data
Researchers have used a multilayer software framework for querying graph databases to customize distributed-memory high-performance computing clusters.
From ACM News
Curiosity Rover Finds Biologically seful Nitrogen on Mars
A team using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard NASA's Curiosity rover has made the first detection of nitrogen on the surface of Mars from release during heating of Martian sediments.
From ACM News
Five Medieval Alternatives to Sat Nav
During the Middle Ages, the Vikings set sail in longships to raid faraway settlements and plunder their riches, but how did they find their way?
From ACM News
Extreme Cryptography Paves Way to Personalized Medicine
The dream for tomorrow's medicine is to understand the links between DNA and disease—and to tailor therapies accordingly.
From ACM TechNews
Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak on the Apple Watch, Electric Cars, and the Surpassing of Humanity
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is concerned about what rapid advancements in artificial intelligence will mean for the future of humanity.
From ACM TechNews
Obama, Wowed By Young Scientists, Announces New STEM Pledges
U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday announced more than $240 million in pledges to boost the study of science, technology, engineering, and math.
From ACM TechNews
Better Debugger
Researchers last week unveiled a new algorithm for identifying integer-overflow bugs.
From ACM TechNews
Smarter Smart Grids
North Carolina State University researchers are using cloud computing resources to analyze smart grid data.
From ACM TechNews
Me, Myself, and Icub: Meet the Robot With a Self
Researchers at the University of Sheffield's Sheffield Robotics program are trying to give their iCub robot an artificial "self."
From ACM News
How Crashing Drones Are Exposing Secrets About .s. War Operations
Crashing drones are spilling secrets about U.S. military operations.
From ACM TechNews
Computer Science Surge Sparks Campus Building Boom
Colleges and universities across the U.S. have been building new facilities to keep up with expanding science, technology, engineering, and math programs.
From ACM News
Rewriting the Rules of Turing's Imitation Game
We have self-driving cars, knowledgeable digital assistants, and software capable of putting names to faces as well as any expert.
From ACM News
Machine Consciousness: Big Data Analytics and the Internet of Things
During my visit to General Electric's Global Research Centers in San Ramon, California, and Niskayuna, New York, last month, I got what amounts to an end-to-end tour of what GE calls the "Industrial Internet."
From ACM News
Stonebraker Receives 2014 ACM A.m. Turing Award
MIT’s Stonebraker brought relational database systems from concept to commercial success.
From ACM News
The Waves of the Future May Bend Around Metamaterials
Plastics. Computers. Metamaterials?
From ACM News
For a Brighter Robotics Future, It's Time to Offload Their Brains
Robots already stand in for humans in some of the dullest and most dangerous jobs there are, handling everything from painting cars to drilling rocks on Mars.
From ACM News
Voice Control Will Force an Overhaul of the Whole Internet
Jason Mars built his own Siri and then he gave it away.
From ACM News
Next in Live Entertainment: Watching People Code
Streaming video of developers as they code is gaining a growing audience.
From ACM Opinion
What If Web Search Results Were Based on Accuracy?
Imagine, for a moment, that every Web search gave only accurate, verified information.
From ACM TechNews
New Approach ses 'twisted Light' to Increase the Efficiency of Quantum Cryptography Systems
University of Rochester researchers have developed a way to transfer 2.05 bits per photon by using "twisted light."
From ACM TechNews
How DARPA Plans to Decrypt the Languages That Computers Still Don't nderstand
A U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project that will officially launch in May is an effort to aid interpreters by decrypting speech.
From ACM TechNews
Polymorphic Security Warnings More Effective Than Same, Static Ones
Polymorphic security warnings help reduce habituation in the brain, making computer users more likely to pay attention and not dismiss them outright.
From ACM News
Nasa Reformats Memory of Longest-Running Mars Rover
After avoiding use of the rover's flash memory for three months, the team operating NASA's 11-year-old Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reformatted the vehicle's flash memory banks and resumed storing some data overnight…