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An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.


Discoveries Fuel Fight Over Universe's First Light
From ACM News

Discoveries Fuel Fight Over Universe's First Light

Not long after the Big Bang, all went dark.

Mapping the Brain to Build Better Machines
From ACM News

Mapping the Brain to Build Better Machines

Take a three year-old to the zoo, and she intuitively knows that the long-necked creature nibbling leaves is the same thing as the giraffe in her picture book.

Scientists Debate Signatures of Alien Life
From ACM News

Scientists Debate Signatures of Alien Life

Huddled in a coffee shop one drizzly Seattle morning six years ago, the astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman stared blankly at his laptop screen, paralyzed.

A Magical Answer to an 80-Year-Old Puzzle
From ACM News

A Magical Answer to an 80-Year-Old Puzzle

Can you devise a series of steps to avoid hazards two paces to either side of you, even if you are forced to take every second, third or Nth step in your series...

A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation
From ACM News

A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation

At first glance, the big news coming out of this summer's conference on the theory of computing appeared to be something of a letdown.

A Tricky Path to Quantum-Safe Encryption
From ACM News

A Tricky Path to Quantum-Safe Encryption

August 11, the National Security Agency updated an obscure page on its website with an announcement that it plans to shift the encryption of government and military...

A Surprise Source of Life's Code
From ACM News

A Surprise Source of Life's Code

Genes, like people, have families—lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member.

New Letters Added to the Genetic Alphabet
From ACM News

New Letters Added to the Genetic Alphabet

DNA stores our genetic code in an elegant double helix. But some argue that this elegance is overrated.

The New Laws of Explosive Networks
From ACM News

The New Laws of Explosive Networks

Last week, United Airlines grounded nearly 5,000 flights when its computer system crashed.

Networks Reveal the Connections of Disease
From ACM News

Networks Reveal the Connections of Disease

Stefan Thurner is a physicist, not a biologist. But not long ago, the Austrian national health insurance clearinghouse asked Thurner and his colleagues at the Medical...

Quantum Computing Without Qubits
From ACM Opinion

Quantum Computing Without Qubits

For more than 20 years, Ivan H. Deutsch has struggled to design the guts of a working quantum computer.

A Common Logic to Seeing Cats and Cosmos
From ACM News

A Common Logic to Seeing Cats and Cosmos

When in 2012 a computer learned to recognize cats in YouTube videos and just last month another correctly captioned a photo of "a group of young people playing...

Early-­niverse Explorer Looks For Answers
From ACM Opinion

Early-­niverse Explorer Looks For Answers

On March 17, a panel of four astrophysicists held a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to announce that they...

Forging a Qubit to Rule Them All
From ACM News

Forging a Qubit to Rule Them All

Peering into his cabinet of curiosities on a recent spring day, Bob Willett, a scientist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., nimbly plucked a tiny black crystal...

A Fundamental Theory to Model the Mind
From ACM News

A Fundamental Theory to Model the Mind

In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak proclaimed to a group of neuroscientists that it had taken him only 10 minutes to determine where the field had gone wrong...

Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense
From ACM News

Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense

As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, Amit Sahai was fascinated by the strange notion of a "zero-knowledge" proof, a type...

The Future Fabric of Data Analysis
From ACM News

The Future Fabric of Data Analysis

When subatomic particles smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, they create showers of new particles whose signatures are recorded by four...

The Mathematical Shape of Things to Come
From ACM News

The Mathematical Shape of Things to Come

Simon DeDeo, a research fellow in applied mathematics and complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute, had a problem.

A Digital Copy of the ­niverse, Encrypted
From ACM News

A Digital Copy of the ­niverse, Encrypted

Even as he installed the landmark camera that would capture the first convincing evidence of dark energy in the 1990s, Tony Tyson, an experimental cosmologist now...

Imagining Data Without Division
From ACM News

Imagining Data Without Division

Seven years ago, when David Schimel was asked to design an ambitious data project called the National Ecological Observatory Network, it was little more than a...
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