Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2016
From ACM TechNews
Apple's New App Will Teach the Next Generation How to Code
Apple's new Swift Playgrounds iPad application is designed to teach novices how to code, using the Swift programming language with their mobile devices.
From ACM TechNews
Tiny Microchips Enable Extreme Science
Researchers at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration have developed a family of application-specific integrated circuits to measure particles in space.
From ACM TechNews
Nanotech 'tattoo' Can Map Emotions and Monitor Muscle Activity
Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a temporary "electronic tattoo" that can measure the activity of muscle and nerve cells.
From ACM TechNews
Berkeley Lab Scientists Grow Atomically Thin Transistors and Circuits
Scientists have developed a way to chemically assemble transistors and circuits just a few atoms thick, which could lead to paper-thin electronics.
From ACM TechNews
Exploring Networks Efficiently
Researchers are hypothesizing that the study of ant colony behavior could lead to improved network communication algorithms.
From ACM News
The Many Ways to Map the Brain
Brain mapping has come a long way since the days of Korbinian Brodmann.
From ACM News
Robert Fano, Computing Pioneer and Founder of Csail, Dies at 98
A professor emeritus helped launch field of information theory and developed early time-sharing computers.
From ACM News
DARPA Hopes Automation Can Create the Perfect Hacker
Look out, human hackers. Pentagon research agency DARPA says people are too slow at finding and fixing security bugs and wants to see smart software take over the task.
From ACM News
Clever Tool Shields Your Car From Hacks By Watching Its Internal Clocks
Car-hacking demonstrations tend to get all the glory in the security research community—remotely paralyzing a Jeep on the highway or cutting a Corvette’s brakes through its Internet-connected insurance dongle.
From ACM TechNews
Durus Brings Human-Like Gait (and Fancy Shoes) to Hyper-Efficient Robots
SRI International's DURUS robot can now walk like a human while wearing normal shoes.
From ACM News
How China Is Rewriting the Book on Human Origins
On the outskirts of Beijing, a small limestone mountain named Dragon Bone Hill rises above the surrounding sprawl.
From ACM TechNews
How to Stay Anonymous Online
New technology for protecting anonymity online provides stronger security guarantees but uses bandwidth much more efficiently than previous anonymity networks.
From ACM TechNews
Graphene Could Revolutionize the Internet of Things
Researchers say they have developed a tunable, graphene-based device that could significantly boost the speed and efficiency of wireless communication systems.
From ACM TechNews
Air Force Seeks Ideas For How Quantum Computing Can Help Warfighters
The U.S. Air Force has requested white papers that describe new ways quantum computing could help achieve its mission.
From ACM News
Dna as a Data Storage Medium
Will genetic material supplant other substances for archival data storage?
From ACM News
Brain-Data Gold Mine Could Reveal How Neurons Compute
Inspired by the large-scale sky surveys with which astronomers explore the cosmos, neuroscientists in Seattle, Washington, have spent four years systematically surveying the neural activity of the mouse visual cortex.
From ACM News
Robots Could Hack Turing Test By Keeping Silent
The Turing test, the quintessential evaluation designed to determine if something is a computer or a human, may have a fatal flaw, new research suggests.
From ACM TechNews
Science on the Verge of Creating 'emotional' Computer
Researchers are developing an emotion-based artificial intelligence that will be able to understand the context of what is going on, as well as unfolding scenarios.
From ACM TechNews
In-Ear Eeg Makes nobtrusive Brain-Hacking Gadgets a Real Possibility
Two research teams are developing electroencephalogram sensors that fit inside the ear.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Want to Achieve Machine Translation of the 24 Languages of the Eu
Saarland University researchers are developing an automated system for translating between the languages of the European Union.
From ACM TechNews
Extortion Extinction: Researchers Develop a Way to Stop Ransomware
University of Florida researchers have developed a system they say can thwart ransomware.
From ACM TechNews
Computer Hackers Don't Stand a Chance Against These Girls
The GenCyber program consists of 119 summer camps for girls sponsored by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Academy of Sciences.
From ACM News
A Computer Binge-Watched Tv and Learned to Predict What Happens Next
You watch hundreds of hours of television, they call you a lazy slob. A computer does it, and it's a technological success story.
From ACM News
Nasa's Juno Spacecraft Sends First In-Orbit View
The JunoCam camera aboard NASA's Juno mission is operational and sending down data after the spacecraft's July 4 arrival at Jupiter.
From ACM TechNews
How to Keep More Girls in It at Schools If We're to Close the Gender Gap
The gender gap in the information technology industry is underscored by a lack of engagement of girls in computing and IT education.
From ACM News
Europe Approves New Trans-Atlantic Data Transfer Deal
European officials approved a new agreement on Tuesday that will allow some of the world’s largest companies, including Google and General Electric, to move digital information freely between the European Union and the United…
From ACM News
Clouds Get High on Climate Change
Clouds are moving up, up and away. An analysis of satellite data has found that, since the early 1980s, clouds have shifted towards Earth's poles and cloud tops have extended higher into the atmosphere.
From ACM TechNews
The Code That Took America to the Moon Was Just Published to Github
The flight software for the Apollo 11 space program last week was uploaded to the GitHub code-sharing website.
From ACM TechNews
Olcf Expands Data Analytics Capability With Popular Programming Language
Users at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility are able to use R data analytics software to manage and analyze enormous datasets generated by supercomputers.
From ACM TechNews
Nmsu Team Wins International Competition For Software to Help Emergency Responders
Competitors in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Icehouse Challenge were tasked with creating software for emergency responders.