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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 Roboticist's Trip From Mines to the Moon
From ACM News

A Roboticist's Trip From Mines to the Moon

Robots created by William "Red" Whittaker have crawled into mines and volcanoes, crossed deserts, won a 60-mile road race, helped clean up nuclear waste and harvested...

Autopiloted Glider Knows Where to Fly For a Free Ride
From ACM News

Autopiloted Glider Knows Where to Fly For a Free Ride

Hawks and albatrosses soar for hours or even days without having to land. Soon robotic gliders could go one better, soaring on winds and thermals indefinitely...

Who
From ACM News

Who

My dad, who at 98 no longer drives, used to complain about women drivers, defensive drivers, slow drivers, cab drivers and, occasionally, fast drivers. I should...

New Animation Depicts Next Mars Rover in Action
From ACM News

New Animation Depicts Next Mars Rover in Action

Although NASA's Mars Science Laboratory will not leave Earth until late this year nor land on Mars until August 2012, anyone can watch those dramatic events now...

Graphene Technology Moves Closer
From ACM News

Graphene Technology Moves Closer

Graphene is a "wonder material" waiting to happen. Since this super-conductive form of carbon, made from single-atom-thick sheets, was first produced in 2004,...

Layer ­pon Layer
From ACM News

Layer ­pon Layer

Graphene, a form of pure carbon arranged in a lattice just one atom thick, has interested countless researchers with its unique strength and its electrical and...

Minds, Machines Merge to Offer New Hope For Overcoming Impairments
From ACM News

Minds, Machines Merge to Offer New Hope For Overcoming Impairments

Scientists are creating a new generation of artificial body parts to help people with disabilities see, walk, swim, grip and run among other things. Miles O'Brien...

Nasa Aims For Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon
From ACM News

Nasa Aims For Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon

Like pretty much every other agency in the government, NASA is likely to be hurting for money over the next few years. The end of the Space Shuttle program, which...

Down with Pi! The Math Nerds Behind the Tau Movement
From ACM News

Down with Pi! The Math Nerds Behind the Tau Movement

Happy Tau Day, everyone! Every June 28, a rogue fleet of math nerds makes its case for the abolition of arguably the most important irrational number in the world...

From ACM News

Cooperative Robots That Learn = Less Work For Human Handlers

Learning a language can be difficult for some, but for babies it seems quite easy. With support from the National Science Foundation, linguist Jeffrey Heinz and...

From ACM News

Smarter Task-Transfers ­se Mobile Cameras

MIT and Google have devised a method of transferring tasks between your smartphone and your computer by merely pointing the cell-phone camera at your PC's screen...

Light at the End of the Racetrack: How Pixar Explored the Physics of Light for Cars 2
From ACM News

Light at the End of the Racetrack: How Pixar Explored the Physics of Light for Cars 2

Although the stories told by Pixar Animation Studios take place in richly realized fantasy realms, the science and technology required to create those worlds...

From ACM News

Could This Brain Implant Revive Paralyzed Limbs?

In the annals of great oxymorons, "non-invasive brain implant" would surely rank up there. Misnomer or not, the University of Michigan is touting just such a...

From ACM News

Mind-Controlled

Video games can be mesmerizing, even for a rhesus monkey. Which may explain, in part, why six-year-old Jasper has been sitting transfixed at a computer screen...

From ACM News

Big Win For the Losers at D-Wave

Does D-Wave's first big sale disprove the quantum computing naysayers?

From ACM News

DARPA Crowdsources Interstellar Travel

Last August, a bunch of Star Wars fans pestered NASA about a timetable for building a hyperdrive engine. Maybe someone was listening. In May, the Defense Advanced...

A Start-Up
From ACM News

A Start-Up

With an innovative camera due out later this year from a company called Lytro, photographers will have one less excuse for having missed that perfect shot.

Remembering Alan Turing on His 99th Birthday
From ACM News

Remembering Alan Turing on His 99th Birthday

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, a noted polymath and cryptanalyst who is regarded by many as being the grandfather of modern computing...

How to Make a Clock Run For 10,000 Years
From ACM News

How to Make a Clock Run For 10,000 Years

High on a rocky ridge in the desert, nestled among 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines, is the topmost part of a clock that has been ticking for thousands of years...

From ACM Opinion

Eff and Bitcoin

For several months, EFF has been following the movement around Bitcoin, an electronic payment system that touts itself as "the first decentralized digital currency...
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