Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2017
From ACM News
Cars Suck p Data About You. Where Does It All Go?
Cars have become rolling listening posts. They can track phone calls and texts, log queries to websites, record what radio stations you listen to—even tell you when you are breaking the law by exceeding the speed limit.
From ACM TechNews
Color-Shifting Electronic Skin Could Have Wearable Tech and Prosthetic ses
Researchers have developed a user-interactive electronic skin with a color change perceptible to the human eye.
From ACM News
Half of Milky Way's Matter Comes from Distant Galaxies
Up to half of the Milky Way is made up of matter that came from distant galaxies, having been ejected from its home during supernova explosions.
From ACM News
Nanoneurons Enable Neuromorphic Chips For Voice Recognition
Last month, IEEE Spectrum ran a special report focusing on the question "Can We Copy the Brain?" The report offered a thorough examination of all the ongoing efforts in duplicating the human brain both in terms of hardware and…
From ACM News
Storing Data in Dna Brings Nature Into the Digital universe
Humanity is producing data at an unimaginable rate, to the point that storage technologies can't keep up.
From ACM News
First Human Embryos Edited in .s.
The first known attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos in the United States has been carried out by a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon, MIT Technology Review has learned.
From ACM TechNews
Google Enters Race For Nuclear Fusion Technology
Google Research and Tri Alpha Energy have developed a computer algorithm called Optometrist that facilitates integrating high-powered computation with human judgment to find new and better solutions to challenging problems in…
From ACM TechNews
Chinese Scientists Create Biggest Virtual niverse With World's Fastest Computer
Chinese researchers have produced the largest virtual universe on Sunway TaihuLight, the world's fastest supercomputer, using 10 trillion digital particles. The simulation beat the scale of the previous record-holding model universe…
From ACM TechNews
Hackers Plan to Break Into 30 Voting Machines to Put Election Meddling to the Test
Hackers at the DefCon convention announced they will attempt to compromise more than 30 voting systems used in recent elections this weekend to determine whether fears of election tampering by malefactors are justified.
From ACM TechNews
Obama-Era Computer Science Initiative Surging Ahead Despite Hurdles
The Trump administration's lack of support for $4 billion CSforAll initiative of the Obama administration has spurred agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation, private organizations, and activist groups to take the…
From ACM TechNews
'magic Bench' Lets sers See, Hear, and Feel Animated Characters
Researchers at Disney have developed the "Magic Bench," a combined augmented and mixed reality experience in which multiple users experience virtual surroundings as a group, without using head-mounted displays or handheld devices…
From ACM News
Robots, Start Your Engines!
There's nothing like a throw-down to push new technologies out to the masses.
From ACM News
Large, Distant Comets More Common Than Previously Thought
Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the Sun are notoriously difficult to study.
From ACM News
Complex Biological Computer Commands Living Cells
Researchers have developed a biological computer that functions inside living bacterial cells and tells them what to do, according to a report published yesterday in Nature.
From ACM News
Big Names in Statistics Want to Shake p Much-Maligned value
Science is in the throes of a reproducibility crisis, and researchers, funders and publishers are increasingly worried that the scholarly literature is littered with unreliable results.
From ACM TechNews
New Grid Study Sees .s. Vulnerable to Cyberattacks
The U.S. needs to do more to protect its electrical grid against high-impact cyberattacks, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
From ACM TechNews
Two Groups Both Win $7.5m to Study Ai, Autonomous Systems
The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded $15 million to two Cornell University research teams to pursue autonomous systems and artificial intelligence.
From ACM TechNews
There Are More Programming Jobs Than Ever Outside of Silicon Valley
Programming jobs have spread across the U.S. and pooled in other metro areas outside of Silicon Valley, according to data from Glassdoor.
From ACM News
China's Robot Revolution
The Chinese Robotics Industry Alliance aims to use robotics and automation to help China become increasingly a high-tech manufacturing nation.
From ACM News
The Data that Transformed AI Research, and Possibly the World
It's not about the algorithm.
From ACM News
Scientists Build Dna from Scratch to Alter Life's Blueprint
At Jef Boeke's lab, you can whiff an odor that seems out of place, as if they were baking bread here.
From ACM TechNews
AI-Generated Map Predicts Who Will Die Next in 'game of Thrones'
A new machine-learning algorithm can predict which characters on "Game of Thrones" will die next.
From ACM TechNews
CLA Research Offers Clearest Evidence of Long-Sought Majorana Particle
A research team has uncovered evidence for the existence of the Majorana particle.
From ACM TechNews
Meet rduscript, the First rdu-Based Programming Language
UrduScript is a new programing language that makes it easier for beginners to learn programming concepts.
From ACM TechNews
Cpu Architecture After Moore's Law: What's Next?
Views differ on how central-processing unit architecture will proceed as Moore's Law becomes increasingly irrelevant.
From ACM TechNews
Five Times the Computing Power
Researchers have developed a method to increase by the computing power of a standard algorithm when performed on a field-programmable gate array.
From ACM TechNews
Chaos Theory Strengthens Digital Locks
Researchers have definitively demonstrated the strength of a 128-bit digital lock for cybersecurity applications.
From ACM News
For Computers, Too, It's Hard to Learn to Speak Chinese
Researchers often call 2017 the year of the conversational computer in China.
From ACM News
The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With Youtube
Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands.
From ACM News
Smart Contact Lenses and Eye Implants Will Give Doctors Medical Insights
Poets say the eyes are a window to the soul. But biomedical engineers are using the eyes to gain insight into the body.