Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2018
From ACM News
Time Split to the Nanosecond Is Precisely What Wall Street Wants
Computer scientists at Stanford University and Google have created technology that can track time down to 100 billionths of a second. It could be just what Wall Street is looking for.
From ACM News
Why Are Countries Creating Public Random Number Generators?
In Chile, politicians resent the Comptroller General, which audits government officials to prevent corruption.
From ACM Careers
China's Penetration of Silicon Valley Creates Risks for Startups
From ACM TechNews
Taking Breaks Boosts Team Performance
New research has found that taking regular breaks can improve team performance.
From ACM TechNews
Rough Terrain? No Problem for Beaver-Inspired Autonomous Robot
A new system allows autonomous robots to behave like beavers, termites, and other creatures that build structures in response to environmental cues.
From ACM TechNews
Students, Chicago Scientists Turn Wrigley Field Into Data Lab
Researchers and students worked together to turn the city’s Wrigley Field ballpark into a sensor node installation.
From ACM TechNews
Cybersecurity Goes to Summer Camp
University of Virginia researchers are training educators on how to teach cybersecurity to adolescents through a summer camp program.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Develop a Better Method to Compare Gene Expression in Single Cells
Researchers have developed an algorithm to help identify biomarkers that differentiate between cell populations at the single-cell level.
From ACM Careers
Inventing the Future in Chinese Labs: How Does China Do Science Today?
Genetic engineering, the search for dark matter, quantum computing and communications, artificial intelligence, brain science—the list of potentially disruptive research goes on.
From ACM News
Complex Organics Bubble p from Enceladus
Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal complex organic molecules originating from Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, strengthening the idea that this ocean world hosts conditions suitable for life.
From ACM Careers
Robots or Job Training: Manufacturers Grapple With How to Improve Their Economic Fortunes
For Anthony Nighswander, rock-bottom unemployment is both a headache and an opportunity. For businesses and workers, it could be the key to reversing one of the country's most vexing economic problems: slow productivity growth…
From ACM TechNews
Students Develop App Aimed at Preventing Suicide
Middle-school students in Kalispell, MT, have built an app to help prevent suicide.
From ACM TechNews
IEEE Makes OpenFog Consortium's Reference Architecture Official Standard for Fog Computing
The IEEE Standards Association has embraced the OpenFog Consortium's reference architecture as a fog computing standard.
From ACM TechNews
IBM Pits Computer Against Human Debaters
In its first public demonstration, IBM tested its Project Debater computer system against two human debaters.
From ACM TechNews
Wi-Fi Security Is Starting to Get its Biggest pgrade in Over a Decade
The Wi-Fi Alliance has begun certifying products that support WPA3, a major security advance over the WPA2 protocol that has been in use since 2004.
From ACM News
Open Source Professionals in Demand
An "increasingly open source world" needs specialists in Linux and other open source technologies.
From ACM News
The Rise of DNA Data Storage
The 144 words of Robert Frost's seminal poem "The Road Not Taken" fit neatly onto a single printed page. Or in a 1-kilobyte data file.
From ACM News
Daring Japanese Mission Reaches nexplored Asteroid Ryugu
After travelling for three-and-a-half years, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 this week makes its final approach to the asteroid Ryugu.
From ACM News
China Extends Lead as Most Prolific Supercomputer Maker
America is now home to the world's speediest supercomputer. But the new list of the 500 swiftest machines underlines how much faster China is building them.
From ACM TechNews
Low-Cost Plastic Sensors Could Monitor a Range of Health Conditions
An international team of researchers has developed a low-cost sensor that can diagnose or monitor a wide range of health conditions.
From ACM TechNews
'Interacting With Students Provides Rewards That Are Hard to Beat'
Baldwin Wallace University's Jodi Tims, chair of ACM's Council on Women in Computing, discusses how an academic career in computer science offers exceptional rewards.
From ACM TechNews
Study Finds Daily Cycles in Our Thinking Patterns
Researchers have found that a person's mode of thinking changes at different times of the day and follows a 24-hour pattern.
From ACM TechNews
3D-Printed Soft Robots Can Be Controlled by Magnets
Engineers have developed small three-dimensionally printed structures whose movements can be controlled with external magnetic fields.
From ACM TechNews
Frank Heart, Who Linked Computers Before the Internet, Dies at 89
Frank Heart, who supervised development of the first routing computer for the precursor to the Internet, has passed away.
From ACM TechNews
Closing the Loop for Robotic Grasping
Scientists in Australia have developed a faster, more accurate way for robots to grasp objects, particularly in cluttered and changing environments.
From ACM News
Are We Alone in the niverse?
Say goodbye to ET, Marvin the Martian and Yoda. Humans are probably the only intelligent life in the universe, researchers from the University of Oxford have reported in a paper posted to academic preprint server arXiv.
From ACM News
NASA Asks: Will We Know Life When We See It?
In the last decade, we have discovered thousands of planets outside our solar system and have learned that rocky, temperate worlds are numerous in our galaxy.
From ACM News
A .S. Machine Recaptures the Supercomputing Crown
Today, U.S. supercomputer advocates are cheering, because for the first time since 2012, a U.S. supercomputer—Oak Ridge National Laboratory's newly installed Summit supercomputer—has been ranked #1 in performance, capturing the…
From ACM News
Adobe Is Using AI to Catch Photoshopped Images
While picture editors have tweaked images for decades, modern tools like Adobe Photoshop let them alter photos to the point of complete fabrication.
From ACM TechNews
India's Pratyush, Mihir among Top 100 Supercomputers Worldwide
India's two fastest supercomputers, Pratyush and Mihir, both rank among the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world, according to the most recent Top500 list.