Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2010
From ACM News
Researchers Move Organic Nanoelectronics a Step Closer
An international team of researchers has overcome a key stumbling block by using metal crystal to order the molecules in the PEDOT, the single most industrially important conducting polymer.
From ACM News
Programming 'boot Camp' Offers Basic Training
John Stamey is a drill-sergeant to computer science students at Coastal Carolina University. Everyone in first-semester programming must write 370 programs. Student performance has improved dramatically.
From ACM TechNews
Flickr Photos Yield Tourist Trails
Yahoo! researchers have developed a tool that draws on the database of millions of Flickr photos to generate detailed itineraries of what tourist sites to visit and in what order.
From ACM News
Chinese Aim to Build the Next Silicon Valley
Many of the cool tools consumers crave, such as iPads, smart phones and laptops, were dreamed up in the United States. But when it came time to turn the inventors' ideas into real products, the manufacturing work was sent to…
From ACM TechNews
Gaming Chips Score in Data Centers
Computers based on the graphical processing unit chips that power today's computer games are increasingly being used in place of supercomputers for many technical research tasks.
From ACM News
Technology Milestone Heralds a More Secure Internet
Moves to make the web's address system more secure will take a major step forward next month. In the planning for a decade, the Domain Name System Security Extentions, DNSSEC, will help protect users from cyber attacks such as…
From ICT Results
Nanospheres Stretch Limits of Hard Disk Storage
A new magnetic recording medium made up of tiny nanospheres has been devised by European researchers. The technology may lead to hard disks able to store more than a thousand billion bits of information in a square inch.
From ACM News
Singapore Gets Wired For Speed
This island city-state, thanks to its small size and a big public investment, could soon be the first country blanketed with a fiber optic infrastructure so fast that it would enable the contents of a DVD to be downloaded in…
From ACM News
Sandia to Play Major Role in Creation of 'virtual' Nuclear Reactor
Sandia National Laboratories computational scientists will lead two of five technical areas in a U.S. Department of Energy effort to create a "virtual" nuclear reactor, to be headquartered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
From ACM News
Japanese Baby-Bot to Shed Light on Human Learning
Japanese researchers have created a baby robot designed to simulate the behavior and development of a real infant in an effort to better understand how humans grow up.
From ACM TechNews
Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It
Children in kindergarten are being introduced to engineering as school districts across the U.S. embark on an aggressive pursuit of the discipline amid growing worries that students lack the technical skills to compete in an…
From ACM TechNews
Imec Ramps Resistive Ram Research
Increasingly diverse applications that influence specifications and device requirements will prevent resistive RAMs from leading to a single "universal" memory, predict's IMEC's program director for CMOS technology Laith Altimime…
From ACM TechNews
New Musical Resonance, Via Your Cell Phone
Drexel University researchers have developed software that listens to a live orchestral performance and then displays real-time information describing the relevant music theory and context on an iPhone.
From ACM News
19th-Century Tech Makes a Smarter iPhone
Rarely has 19th-century technology stirred an audience of 21st-century technophiles as it did last week when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs revealed that the next-generation iPhone will pack a gyroscope. But will this new sensor…
From ACM TechNews
3-D Without the Glasses
Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group has designed a lens that presents different images to a viewer's left and right eye, which could make it possible to watch three-dimensional movies without glasses.
From ACM TechNews
Nanowires Could Lead to Foldable Tablets, Say Researchers
Duke University scientists have developed a method to make large quantities of copper nanowires, which could be used to create bendable, foldable tablet computers.
From ACM TechNews
Python Language Upgrade Slithers Toward Final Release
Developers of Python 2.7 offered a release candidate for the last upgrade in the legacy 2.x dynamic language line earlier in June, and plan to make a finished version available July 3, says Python Software Foundation chairman…
From ACM News
Microsoft's Xbox Motion Control System Is Kinect
After more than a year of speculation, we finally know what Microsoft's new motion-control system is called. For those that have referred to it for a year as Project Natal, meet Kinect for Xbox 360.
From ACM News
Merely Human? That
On a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen…
From ACM News
A Decade Later, Genetic Map Yields Few New Cures
Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits.
From ACM News
Boldly Going Nowhere: Nasa Ends Plan to Put Man Back on Moon
NASA has begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that were to have taken astronauts back to the Moon, effectively dismantling what was arguably America's greatest technological achievement.
From ACM News
Computing with Secrets, but Keeping them Safe
A novel technique could see future Web services work with sensitive data without ever being able to read it. Several implementations of a mathematical proof unveiled just last year will allow cryptographers to start making the…
From ACM News
Pentagon Manhunt
Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that…
From ACM TechNews
Programming Visually With Sikuli
Researchers at MIT and the University of Maryland have created Sikuli, software that could eventually make programming easy enough for everyday computer users.
From ACM TechNews
Europe's PRACE HPC Grid Aims for Exaflop Power by 2019
The EC is funding a project to develop a grid of up to six "tier 0" high-performance computing systems and is aiming for a combined computing power in the multi-petaflop range in the next five years, and in the exaflop range…
From ACM TechNews
Flying Bots That Self-Assemble
Swiss researchers are developing a swarm of single-propeller robots that are able to self-assemble and take flight.
From ACM TechNews
Why Do Women Leave Science And Engineering?
Increasing the retention rate of women in science, technology, engineering, and math fields could help stem the U.S.'s declining share in world patenting and scientific publishing, writes McGill University professor Jennifer…
From ACM TechNews
New System Developed for Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease
University of Grenada researchers have developed techniques that enable the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease by analyzing computer images.
From ACM TechNews
Protecting Privacy: Make the Data 'fade Away'
Personal information can be protected by having it gradually fade away over time, says the University of Twente's Harold van Heerde, whose dissertation shows that data degradation can be implemented with an acceptable loss of…
From ACM TechNews
Study Looks at Potential Effects of Multi-Touch Devices
Arizona State University professor Kanav Kahol is leading a research effort to evaluate whether the long-term use of multitouch devices places musculoskeletal stress on users.