Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2014
From ACM TechNews
Your T-Shirt's Ringing: Telecommunications in the Spaser Age
New technology could make it possible to print extremely thin mobile phones directly on clothing.
From ACM News
The First Look at How Google's Self-Driving Car Handles City Streets
The first rule of riding in Google's self-driving car, says Dmitri Dolgov, is not to compliment Google's self-driving car.
From ACM News
‘a Real Inventor’: w’s Gary Kildall, Father of the Pc Operating System, Honored For Key Work
Gary Kildall, who died in 1994, will be honored by the IEEE for his creation of the landmark PC operating system CP/M, as well as his invention of BIOS.
From ACM News
Supreme Court Takes on Privacy in Digital Age
Two Supreme Court cases about police searches of cellphones without warrants present vastly different views of the ubiquitous device.
From ACM TechNews
Data Mashups Can Help Answer the World's Biggest Questions
The Medical and Environmental Data Mashup Infrastructure project aims to enable research into the links between climate, weather, environment, and health.
From ACM News
Low-Level Federal Judges Balking at Law Enforcement Requests For Electronic Evidence
Judges at the lowest levels of the federal judiciary are balking at sweeping requests by law enforcement officials for cellphone and other sensitive personal data, declaring the demands overly broad and at odds with basic constitutional…
From ACM News
p Close on Baseball's Borders
Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated has called the line running through Connecticut that separates Yankee fans and Red Sox fans the Munson-Nixon line.
From ACM TechNews
When the Internet Dies, Meet the Meshnet That Survives
A nonprofit recently staged a small-scale drill mimicking the outages that affected New York after Superstorm Sandy hit in 2012.
From ACM TechNews
Google Names Participants For 2014 Summer of Code Program
The 10th Annual Google Summer of Code program will involve 1,307 students working with 190 mentoring organizations to create open source code.
From ACM TechNews
It's Now Possible to Wirelessly Charge 40 Smartphones From 16 Feet Away
Researchers have broken a record by transmitting enough power wirelessly over a distance of about 16 feet to simultaneously charge up to 40 smartphones.
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft, Google, Other Tech Giants nite to Prevent Next Heartbleed
Microsoft, Google, and other tech giants have committed to contribute more than $3 million to an initiative to improve open source software.
From ACM TechNews
High School Students Are All About Computers but Get Little Instruction in Computer Science
There is a significant gap between U.S. high school students' exposure to computer science and their use of computers and technology.
From ACM News
Russia's Putin Calls the Internet a 'cia Project'
President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called the Internet a CIA project and made comments about Russia's biggest search engine Yandex, sending the company's shares plummeting.
From ACM News
Americans Predict a Future Like Science Fiction
Given the fast-paced changes that happen in technology, predicting the future has become more fun than guessing who will win the Super Bowl or "Dancing With the Stars."
From ACM News
Virtual Earth Plays Out Fate of Life on the Planet
We can simulate the climate and we can even simulate babies. Now, we can simulate life on Earth, too—the vast and complex interactions of the living organisms on our planet.
From ACM TechNews
Robot Scouts Rooms People Can't Enter
Student researchers are working with Sandia National Laboratories to develop a robotic system that can be used to map rooms in three-dimensional space.
From ACM TechNews
Superconducting Qubit Array Points the Way to Quantum Computers
Researchers say they have demonstrated a new level of reliability in a five-qubit array, moving one step closer to making a quantum computer a reality.
From ACM TechNews
Alzheimer's and Cancer Link Found
Researchers have determined that Alzheimer's disease and glioblastoma multiform, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, share a pathway in gene transcription.
From ACM TechNews
Computational Method Dramatically Speeds Up Estimates of Gene Expression, CMU, UMD Researchers Report
Researchers say they have developed a computational method that dramatically speeds up estimates of gene activity from RNA sequencing data.
From ACM News
Heartbleed Bug Provokes Open Source Soul-Searching
Vulnerability underscored the issue of how projects like OpenSSL should be supported.
From ACM News
Apple's Display Tech Lets Users Interact with 3D Objects in Mid-Air
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published an Apple patent application for an "Interactive three-dimensional display system," which details a method of presenting users with what appears to be a 3D image that can be manipulated…
From ACM Opinion
The Cloud Industry Needs Aereo to Win. But Consumers Need Something Better.
The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week's Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance art.
From ACM News
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014
Technology news is full of incremental developments, but few of them are true milestones.
From ACM News
Scientists Develop Antarctic Ice Dating Technique Using Krypton
Using a form of krypton, a chemical element created when cosmic rays hit the planet, scientists have developed a new technique to more accurately date ancient Antarctic ice which could help them understand the forces that have…
From ACM Opinion
How America's Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
Stories set in the future are often judged, as time passes, on whether they come true or not.
From ACM News
Michigan Man Among 1st in U.s. to Get 'bionic Eye'
A degenerative eye disease slowly robbed Roger Pontz of his vision.
From ACM News
Listening to the Big Bang
For six months each year, the perennially dark and wind-swept plains of the southern polar ice cap have an average temperature of about 58 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
From ACM TechNews
'photonic Transistor' Switches Light Signals Instead of Electronic Signals
A practical "photonic transistor" for optical interconnects will be able to control light signals similarly to electronic transistors.
From ACM TechNews
Code Camp Empowers High School Girls With Computer Science Education
Stanford's Girls Teach Girls To Code program recently hosted more than 200 high school girls on campus for a "Code Camp."
From ACM TechNews
Researchers se Twitter to Predict Crime
Twitter can be useful for predicting up to 25 kinds of crimes, especially offenses like stalking, thefts, and certain kinds of assault, if the correct analysis is applied.