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
Trip to Mars: Will Stress & Fatigue Impact Performance?
A six-man international crew entered an isolation chamber in Moscow on Thursday (June 3) for a simulated 520-day mission to Mars.
From ACM News
Ocean Currents Likely to Carry Oil Along Atlantic Coast
A detailed computer modeling study released today indicates that oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer.
From ACM News
sing Neural Networks to Classify Music
University of Hong Kong students trained a convolutional neural network built for image recognition to classify music.
From ACM TechNews
Vint Cerf on What the Net Needs Now
Google's Vint Cerf says the Internet needs better security across all of its levels, and says that common ground must be found concerning what constitutes Internet abuse.
From ACM TechNews
The Coming Data Explosion
The Internet is facing an explosion of data as more and more devices are connected to the Internet. Already, the growth rate of data on the Web is outpacing Moore's Law, according to Hewlett-Packard Labs' Parthasarathy Ranganathan…
From ACM TechNews
The Cybersecurity Changes We Need
The Obama administration's progress toward the goal of making the U.S. digital infrastructure "secure, trustworthy, and resilient" has been sluggish due to the general perception of cybersecurity as a drag on short-term economic…
From ACM News
Glimpse of Heavy Electrons Reveals 'hidden Order'
Unconventional use of a well-known scientific instrument has helped scientists unravel a 25-year-old physics mystery and reveal a "hidden order" of the electronic structure inside an unusual superconducting material.
From ACM News
Divorce Attorneys Catching Cheaters on Facebook
Before the explosion of social media, Ken Altshuler, a divorce lawyer in Maine, dug up dirt on his client's spouses the old-fashioned way: with private investigators and subpoenas. Now the first place his team checks for evidence…
From ACM News
Data, It's Just a Click Away
Sensorpedia, a network of more than 5,000 sensors that monitor weather conditions, seismic activity, traffic, water levels and much more, is a significant resource that continues to expand.
From ACM News
Jump in Enrollments of First-Time, Full-Time S&e Graduate Students
Enrollments of first-time, full-time graduate students in science and engineering programs in the United States reached a record 108,819 in 2008, an increase of 7.8% over fall 2007 and the largest 1-year increase in the last…
From ACM News
Bill Would Give Feds 'Emergency' Powers to Secure Civilian Nets
A U.S. Senate draft bill would give the federal government the power to take over civilian networks' security, if there's an "imminent cyber threat" and provides the U.S. Department of Homeland Security broad authority to…
From ACM TechNews
Impossible Figures Brought to Life in Virtual Worlds
Chinese University of Hong Kong computer scientists have developed software that depicts physically impossible images in three-dimensional virtual environments.
From ACM TechNews
Project Aims to Halve Cost of a Data Center
Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute plans to create Container Computer 1.0, a set of standards for building data centers inside 20-foot shipping containers.
From ACM TechNews
Detecting a Crime Before It Happens
U.S. government scientists at the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency are immersed in research to see whether various high-tech devices can be exploited to spot nonverbal cues from people with malicious intent…
From ACM TechNews
Surveillance Software Knows What a Camera Sees
UCLA researchers have developed Image to Text (I2T), a computer vision system that can generate a real-time text description of what is happening in a surveillance camera video feed.
From ACM News
New Automated Tool 'debugs' Nuclear Weapon Simulations
Purdue University researchers, working with high-performance computing experts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have created an automated program to "debug" simulations used to more efficiently certify the nation's…
From ACM TechNews
Defence Lab Reveals ltimate CCTV
The United Kingdom's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory is developing high-resolution imaging technology for a surveillance systems that can recognize and follow insurgents based on their behavior.
From ACM News
Rise of the Robot Astronomer
A Hubble Space Telescope picture of the Abell Cluster reveals a wide range of galactic diversity. A giant elliptical galaxy dominates the center of the image, but there's also a beautiful spiral at lower right and many smaller…
From ACM News
The Ipad Pulse Reader Scales the Charts
Much has been made of the opportunity presented by Apple’s iPad to big media companies. But surprisingly, it is a $3.99 application created by two Stanford graduate students that is now the top paid application in the entire…
From ACM TechNews
Video Game Accessibility Project to Help Blind Children Exercise
University of Nevada, Reno researchers have developed motion sensing-based tennis and bowling video games that use physical activity as input and might help visually impaired children become more active and healthy.
From ACM TechNews
House Allocates $84 Billion for Technology R&D
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the America Competes Reauthorization Act of 2010, which provides $85 billion in science and technology research and education funding.
From ACM News
Team Produces Procedure-Based Training Software For Robot-Assisted Surgery
Two scientists have paired up to develop procedure-based, hands-on surgical training software, which has the potential to revolutionize surgical training worldwide.
From ACM News
Developer Preview of the Kamra Ar Browser at Are2010
The Georgia Institute of Technology will release the developer preview of Kamra, the first mobile augmented reality browser for the KHARMA development platform, at ARE2010 in Santa Clara, CA.
From ACM News
Steve Jobs Predicts Tablets to Replace Personal Computers
The era of the personal computer is coming to an end and the tablet will take its place, Steve Jobs predicted at the All Things D Conference on Tuesday (June 1).
From ACM News
Watch the Oil Spill As It Changes
Some of the most reliable witnesses to the changes in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been satellites in orbit.
From ACM TechNews
Willow Garage Gets Robots Into Researchers' Hands
Willow Garage has given 11 teams from around the world the right to use its PR2 open source robots and operating system to develop new uses for the technology and share their work with the robotics community.
From ACM News
What Sites Such as Facebook and Google Know and Whom They Tell
When Disa Powell's husband and brother were badly burned in an electrical explosion while conducting maintenance at a Wal-Mart store and the family sued, the defense went after something she never expected: her online life.
From ACM TechNews
Scaling Goes Extreme
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers are developing software that is capable of describing the behavior of molecules in excited states, as well as simulating their dynamics.
From ACM News
Google Ditches Windows on Security Concerns
Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.
From ACM News
Cellphone in New Role: Loyalty Card
Loyalty cards--those little paper cards that promise a free sandwich or coffee after 10 purchases, but instead get lost or forgotten--are going mobile.