Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2016
From ACM TechNews
Cooling Breakthrough Could Improve Performance of Quantum Computers
University of Southern California researchers have developed a way to minimize errors in quantum computers by reducing and correcting errors associated with heating.
From ACM News
Beyond Crispr: A Guide to the Many Other Ways to Edit a Genome
The CRISPR–Cas9 tool enables scientists to alter genomes practically at will.
From ACM News
Fbi Chief Comey: 'we Have Never Had Absolute Privacy'
FBI Director James Comey has some phones—650 of them, to be exact—that he'd really, really like to take a look at.
From ACM News
Curiosity Rover Report: Four Years on Mars
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity celebrates its fourth year on Mars since landing at Gale crater on August 5, 2012.
From ACM TechNews
Spinning Electrons Could Lead to New Electronics
Graphene and its unique characteristics could transform electronics and expand physicists' understanding of quantum phenomena.
From ACM TechNews
Scientists Are sing Sound to Track Nighttime Bird Migration
Researchers are helping to track the nighttime migratory patterns of birds by teaching a computer to recognize their flight calls.
From ACM TechNews
Nc State to Form Nsf-Funded Center For Advanced Electronics Through Machine Learning With iuc and Georgia Tech
Three universities are forming the Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning to accelerate design and verification of microelectronic circuits and systems.
From ACM News
How to Give Rural America Broadband? Look to the Early 1900s
From the sofa in his living room, Clinton Creason can see the electric pole outside that his father staked 70 years ago to bring power to this remote area of hilly cattle pastures.
From ACM News
When Computers Are The Hackers
A Pittsburgh company's cyber reasoning system takes the $2-million grand prize in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge.
From ACM News
Nasa Maps Thawed Areas Under Greenland Ice Sheet
NASA researchers have helped produce the first map showing what parts of the bottom of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet are thawed—key information in better predicting how the ice sheet will react to a warming climate.
From ACM News
How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes
When Princeton professor Andrew Appel decided to hack into a voting machine, he didn't try to mimic the Russian attackers who hacked into the Democratic National Committee's database last month.
From ACM TechNews
Stanford-Led Experiments Point Toward Memory Chips 1,000 Times Faster Than Today's
Experiments are exploring a new class of semiconductor materials that could form the basis of phase-change memory capable of faster and permanent data storage.
From ACM TechNews
Of Heartbeats, Bones and Brushstrokes
A five-year, $1.5-million award will enable Duke University professor Ingrid Daubechies to expand her collaborative research involving mathematics and electrical engineering.
From ACM TechNews
Cyber Protections Contemplated For U.s. Election Systems
The Obama administration is considering boosting cyber protections for U.S. election systems by classifying them as critical infrastructure.
From ACM TechNews
Troll Hunters: The Twitterbots That Fight Against Online Abuse
Researchers are working to automate the detection of harassment, but one says humans do not agree on what constitutes harassment.
From ACM TechNews
Flexible Wearable Electronic Skin Patch Offers New Way to Monitor Alcohol Levels
University of California, San Diego researchers have developed a wearable sensor that can accurately monitor alcohol level within 15 minutes.
From ACM TechNews
Encryption's Quantum Leap: The Race to Stop the Hackers of Tomorrow
Researchers are looking into the construction of new quantum-proof cryptography ito thwart quantum-based schemes future hackers could use to crack sensitive data.
From ACM News
Def Con: Do Smart Devices Mean Dumb Security?
More and more people are finding that the devices forming this network of smart stuff can make their lives easier.
From ACM News
Machine-Learning Algorithm Combs the Darknet For Zero Day Exploits, and Finds Them
In February 2015, Microsoft identified a critical vulnerability in its Windows operating system that potentially allowed a malicious attacker to remotely control the targeted computer.
From ACM News
Donald E. Knuth Awarded Siam’s Highest Honor, Delivers the John Von Neumann Lecture
Knuth, who received the first ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1971 and the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 1974, was recognized for his contributions to mathematics and computer science.
From ACM News
Good News—the Robocalling Scourge May Not Be Unstoppable After All
New data shows that the majority of robot-enabled scam phone calls came from fewer than 40 call centers, a finding that offers hope the growing menace of robocalls can be stopped.
From ACM News
Hopes For Revolutionary New Lhc Particle Dashed
It would have been bigger than finding the Higgs boson and marked the beginning of a new era in particle physics.
From ACM News
Libraries of Plastic Molecules Could Store Huge Amounts of Data
One day your hard drive could just be a pile of plastic. Researchers have coded a word into short chains of plastic molecules, which could be used as a space-saving way to store our mountains of data—or even to reveal counterfeit…
From ACM TechNews
Programmable Ions Set the Stage For General-Purpose Quantum Computers
Researchers have introduced the first fully programmable and reconfigurable quantum computer module.
From ACM TechNews
Students' App Helps Dementia Patients Find Memories
Cornell University researchers have developed an application that offers to help Alzheimer's patients stay connected to their memories.
From ACM TechNews
Dot-Drawing With Drones
Researchers at McGill University are developing tiny drones to create dot drawings, an artistic technique known as stippling.
From ACM TechNews
AI Reads Your Tweets and Spots When You're Being Sarcastic
Researchers at the University of Lisbon have developed a machine learning system that can identify sarcasm on Twitter by examining a user's past tweets.
From ACM TechNews
Toyota Teaches Cars to Drive By Studying Human Drivers
The development of autonomous-driving capabilities and home-care robots are areas the recently created Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is exploring.
From ACM News
Legal Confusion Threatens to Slow Data Science
Knowledge from millions of biological studies encoded into one network—that is Daniel Himmelstein's alluring description of Hetionet, a free online resource that melds data from 28 public sources on links between drugs, genes…
From ACM News
Single-Pixel Camera Reaches Milestone, Mimicking Human Vision
Computational imaging is undergoing a revolution. This is the discipline of making images using computational techniques rather than optical ones.