Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2011
From ACM News
Exploring Space with Chip-Size Satellites
Gravity may be woven into the very fabric of space-time, but some objects seem nearly immune to its pull. Scale something down to the size of a dust particle and you'll find it can stay aloft almost indefinitely, dancing in…
From ACM TechNews
New Language For Programming in Parallel
SofCheck's Tucker Taft has developed the Parallel Specification and Implementation Language, a new programming language designed to maximize the potential of multicore computer processors by avoiding the problems associated with…
From ACM TechNews
Building a Subversive Grassroots Network
Commotion Wireless is the Open Technology Initiative's effort to develop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) so that citizens of oppressive governments can maintain digital communications in the face of Internet blackouts.
From ACM TechNews
For 'creativity,' Just Add 'crowd'
Stevens Institute of Technology researcher Jeffery Nickerson is studying how to use crowdsourcing to produce creative ideas.
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft's Imagine Cup Competition Seeks Diversity
This year students from six historically black colleges and universities competed in Microsoft's Imagine Cup, and although none of the teams made it to the finals, the schools plan to send more teams to next year's competition…
From ACM TechNews
Crowd-Simulating Software Could Improve Building Design
New crowd simulation software could help architects better understand how the design of buildings impacts the way people move through them.
From ACM News
The Gps: A Fatally Misleading Travel Companion
In remote places like California's Death Valley, over-reliance on GPS navigation systems can be a matter of life and death.
From ACM News
Nsa Lawyer Questioned Over Cellphone Location Tracking of Americans
Is the government using cellular data to track Americans as they move around the U.S.? According to the general counsel of the National Security Agency, it may have that authority.
From ACM News
Massive Project to Study the Link Between Genetics and Health
Kaiser Permanente has compiled the genetic and medical data of 100,000 of its members.
From ACM Opinion
The Edison of Silicon Valley
Steve Perlman, Silicon Valley’s self-styled Thomas Edison, has found a way to increase wireless capacity by a factor of 1,000.
From ACM News
When Patents Attack
Nathan Myhrvold is a genius and a polymath. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as Microsoft's chief technology officer, he's discovered dinosaur fossils, and he recently co-authored a six-volume cookbook that "reveals…
From ACM TechNews
A Bookshelf the Size of the World
The goal of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is to make the digitized collections of the greatest research institutions in the United States accessible to anyone anywhere at any time for free.
From ACM TechNews
Cyber Weapons: The New Arms Race
A rash of cyberattacks has raised the profile of such incursions and led to a booming cyberweapons industry.
From ACM TechNews
Competition Seeks STEM Innovations
The Carnegie Corporation of New York and other groups have partnered to launch Partnering for Excellence: Innovations in Science+Technology+Engineering+Math Education, an online competition designed to inspire science, engineering…
From ACM TechNews
Phone App Could Keep an Eye on Your Ride
Intel researchers are working on a project that connects the electronics inside a car to the Internet, so that mobile applications can provide a car owner with updates on the vehicle when the two are separated.
From ACM TechNews
Game Design Engages Students in STEM
The University of Massachusetts' Design Camps is aimed at middle and high school students and teaches them to create and program robots, build circuits, and complete other projects.
From ACM News
The Army's Bold Plan to Turn Soldiers Into Telepaths
The U.S. Army wants to allow soldiers to communicate just by thinking. ?The new science of synthetic telepathy could soon make that happen.
From ACM News
Colleges Join Plan For Faster Computer Networks
A coalition of 29 American universities is throwing its weight behind a plan to build ultra-high-speed computer networks—with Internet service several hundred times faster than what is now commercially available—in the communities…
From ACM News
Blatter Signals Arrival of Goalline Technology
England's Premier League and any others who want to introduce goalline technology got the go-ahead to do so from FIFA president Sepp Blatter on Wednesday, as long as the law-making International Football Association Board…
From ACM News
Ok, Climate Skeptics: Here's the Raw Data You Wanted
Anyone can now view for themselves the raw data that was at the centre of last year's "climategate" scandal.
From ACM News
Making Stuff with Molecular Precision
For more than a decade, scientists have been touting the promise of nanomaterials as a source of new and better products, from stronger structural materials to speedy but power-efficient computers to drugs that target and…
From ACM Opinion
Nature's Hidden Prime Number Code
Ever since humans evolved on this planet we have been trying to make sense of the world around us. We have attempted to explain why the world looks and behaves the way it does, to predict what the future holds.
From ACM News
Space Station to Be Sunk After 2020
Russia and its partners plan to plunge the International Space Station into the ocean at the end of its life cycle after 2020 so as not to leave space junk, the space agency said on Wednesday.
From ACM TechNews
A Network For Wild Experimentation
Internet2 and the Energy Sciences Network have built an experimental networking testbed using dormant dark fiber networking resources. The testbed will be used to create two prototype networks, one of which transfers data at…
From ACM TechNews
Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point For the Spread of Ideas
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers have found that just 10 percent of a population is enough to sway the majority of a society.
From ACM TechNews
Wisebed: The First Pan-European Sensor Network Open to the Scientific Community
The European Wisebed laboratory project, a collaboration between universities and research centers in Germany, Greece, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, consists of more than 1,000 sensors and algorithms that…
From ACM TechNews
Crowdsourced Online Learning Gives Robots Human Skills
Roboticists at Brown University and other institutions are experimenting with using crowdsourcing to teach robots more general skills.
From ACM TechNews
Nsf's New Shared Supercomputing Platform Goes to Extremes
The U.S. National Science Foundation is funding the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, a distributed computing infrastructure that will connect researchers with supercomputers, data, and software tools.
From ACM News
How Engineers Create Artificial Sounds to Fool S
Hundreds of items have their acoustics deliberately tweaked to make us happy, according to Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford.
From ACM News
Can We Make Machines Listen More Carefully?
You probably use voice recognition technology already, if in a limited capacity. Maybe you use Google's voice-activated search, or take advantage of its (somewhat wonky) voice-mail transcriptions in Google Voice. At the office…