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subjectComputer Systems
authorQuanta Magazine
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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.


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...

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 TechNews

The Future Fabric of Data Analysis

A new approach to computation is required for managing big data because of the shift to a decentralized, distributed computer architecture. 

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...

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...

The Proof in the Quantum Pudding
From ACM News

The Proof in the Quantum Pudding

In early May, news reports gushed that a quantum computation device had for the first time outperformed classical computers, solving certain problems thousands...

As Machines Get Smarter, Evidence They Learn Like US
From ACM News

As Machines Get Smarter, Evidence They Learn Like US

The brain performs its canonical task—learning—by tweaking its myriad connections according to a secret set of rules.
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