Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2011
From ACM TechNews
.s. Looking For Revolutionary Binary Code System
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is using its Binary Executable Transforms program to developed revolutionary technologies for analyzing, identifying, and slicing binary executable components.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Improve Method For Finding Genetic Mistakes That Fuel Cancer
Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have developed the Clipping Reveals Structure algorithm, which helps identify the chromosomal rearrangements and DNA insertions or deletions unique to cancer.
From ACM TechNews
Fire-Breathing Dragon Roars to Life
The first practical technique for recreating the sound of fire, based on its behavior, for virtual worlds has been devised by Jeff Chadwick and colleagues at Cornell University.
From ACM News
A Preview of Future Disk Drives
A new type of data storage technology, called phase-change memory, has proven capable of writing some types of data faster than conventional flash based storage.
From ACM News
Computer Studies Made Cool, on Film and Now on Campus
When Keila Fong arrived at Yale, she had never given much thought to computer science. But then last year everyone on campus started talking about the film "The Social Network," and she began to imagine herself building something…
From ACM News
Air France Crash Suggestion: Have Planes Send Black Box Data By Satellite
When Air France flight 447 crashed on a stormy night off Brazil in 2009, it took its secrets with it to the bottom of the Atlantic. There was no distress call, no sign of trouble before the plane disappeared. The plane's "black…
From ACM TechNews
Intel Teaches Machines to Build Own Device Drivers
Intel researchers are developing a method to automate the process of writing device drivers and porting them to different operating systems.
From ACM TechNews
We've Bin Watching You!
With Bincam, Newcastle University computer scientists have used a camera phone and Facebook to introduce an element of competition to recycling and minimizing waste.
From ACM News
Dawn Captures Video on Approach to Asteroid Vesta
Scientists working with NASA's Dawn spacecraft have created a new video showing the giant asteroid Vesta as the spacecraft approaches this unexplored world in the main asteroid belt.
From ACM TechNews
Future of Virtual Reality: What Pregnancy Feels Like
Men can gain a better understanding of what women experience during pregnancy by wearing a new device developed at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
From ACM TechNews
New Parallelization Technique Boosts Our Ability to Model Biological Systems
A new technique for using multicore chips more efficiently has been developed by researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU).
From ACM TechNews
IBM Helps Build Students' Software Development Skills
IBM announced during its Innovative 2011 conference that it is bringing its Jazz development environment to universities. JazzHub is part of an effort to assist students and professionals in building the necessary software development…
From ACM News
.s. nderwrites Internet Detour Around Censors
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy "shadow" Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications…
From ACM News
How Robots Will Beat Humans at Billiards
Once a year, at the International Computer Olympiad, teams pit their AI software against others' in a variety of nerd-appropriate sports: chess, go, backgammon, etc. Since 2005, however, the ICO has also included computer…
From ACM News
Streamlined Rules For Robots
With the explosion of the Internet and the commoditization of autonomous robots (such as the Roomba) and small sensors (such as the ones in most cell phones), computer scientists have become more and more interested in distributed…
From ACM News
Invasion of the Body Hackers
Michael Galpert rolls over in bed in his New York apartment, the alarm clock still chiming. The 28-year-old internet entrepreneur slips off the headband that’s been recording his brainwaves all night and studies the bar graph…
From ACM News
Arrests in Spain Don't Mean Sony's Troubles Are Over
The Spanish police say they've taken down three of the people allegedly behind the massive PlayStation Network security breach in April. But while it's probably comforting for Sony to have someone to blame, this doesn't mean…
From ACM News
The First Computer Musician
In 1957 a 30-year-old engineer named Max Mathews got an I.B.M. 704 mainframe computer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, to generate 17 seconds of music, then recorded the result for posterity.
From ACM TechNews
t Researchers Launch Spamrankings to Flag Hospitals Hijacked By Spammers
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently launched SpamRankings, a Web site that identifies the names and addresses of organizations that are helping send out spam.
From ACM TechNews
Johns Hopkins Expert Finds Randomness Rules in Turbulent Flows
Johns Hopkins University professor Gregory Eyink has determined through computer experiments that turbulent fluid flows are dominated by randomness, and has confirmed theoretical predictions that two identical beads dropped into…
From ACM News
Why There's No Nobel Prize in Computing
When Nobel Prizes are dished out each fall, the most accomplished professionals in computing, telecom, and IT have usually been left out in the cold. That's because there is no Nobel Prize for these fields, and it's unlikely…
From ACM TechNews
Most Malware Tied to 'pay-Per-Install' Market
Researchers have found that most personal computers that get infected with malware were targeted by pay-per-install services, which charge hacking gangs up to $180 per 1,000 successful installations.
From ACM News
Information Flow Can Reveal Dirty Deeds
Political thrillers that portray a "web of corruption" get it all wrong, at least according to an analysis of emails between Enron employees. The flow of the famously corrupt corporation's electronic missives suggests that…
From ACM News
I.b.m. Researchers Create High-Speed Graphene Circuits
I.B.M. researchers said Thursday that they had designed high-speed circuits from graphene, an ultra-thin material that has a host of promising applications from high-bandwidth communication to a new generation of low-cost…
From ACM News
Sony's Kaz Hirai on the Psn Hack
Sony's deputy president about the PlayStation Network hack, PS Vita and PS3's enduring appeal.
From ACM News
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo Team Up to Advance Semantic Web
The move may finally encourage widespread use of technology that makes online information as comprehensible to computers as it is to humans. If the effort works, the result will be not only better search results, but also…
From ACM News
Nasa Probes Suggest Magnetic Bubbles Reside At Solar System Edge
Observations from NASA's Voyager spacecraft, humanity's farthest deep space sentinels, suggest the edge of our solar system may not be smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles.
From ACM News
Army Seeks Social Media Gurus to Save Afghan War
Know how to Tweet? Or how to put words into the mouths of foreign security functionaries? If so, the U.S. Army wants you to help un-quagmire the Afghanistan war.
From ACM News
Tracking Down Twitter's Best Rumor Spreaders
Sometimes it's easy to know which messages will spread through Twitter like wildfire. Just ask Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York), who faces pressure to resign after unwittingly sending an intimate photo of himself to thousands…
From ACM News