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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 Computer With a Great Eye Is About to Transform Botany
From ACM News

A Computer With a Great Eye Is About to Transform Botany

My dad is a wildlife biologist, and during road trips we took when I was growing up he spent a lot of time talking about the grasses and trees along the highway...

The Black-Hole Collision That Reshaped Physics
From ACM News

The Black-Hole Collision That Reshaped Physics

The event was catastrophic on a cosmic scale—a merger of black holes that violently shook the surrounding fabric of space and time, and sent a blast of space-time...

How the Hell Could the FBI Hack Into That iPhone?
From ACM News

How the Hell Could the FBI Hack Into That iPhone?

You know that part about the FBI needing Apple's help to unlock a terrorist's iPhone 5C?

Envisioning Supercomputers of the Future
From ACM TechNews

Envisioning Supercomputers of the Future

The Argo Project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy has enlisted 40 researchers to devise a new approach for extreme-scale system software. 

Human Eyes Assist Drones, Teach Machines to See
From ACM TechNews

Human Eyes Assist Drones, Teach Machines to See

Researchers have developed a new strategy combining crowdsourcing and machine learning for rapidly interpreting aerial images captured by camera drones. 

Stanford's Flying, Perching Scamp Robot Can Climb Straight ­p Walls
From ACM TechNews

Stanford's Flying, Perching Scamp Robot Can Climb Straight ­p Walls

A robot developed at Stanford University is the first to combine flying, perching with passive attachment technology, and climbing. 

From Reagan's Cyber Plan to Apple Vs. Fbi: 'everything Is ­p For Grabs'
From ACM Opinion

From Reagan's Cyber Plan to Apple Vs. Fbi: 'everything Is ­p For Grabs'

The heated debate between the FBI and Apple over the encryption of the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the two people who massacred 14 people in San Bernardino...

New Gravity Map Gives Best View Yet Inside Mars
From ACM News

New Gravity Map Gives Best View Yet Inside Mars

A new map of Mars' gravity made with three NASA spacecraft is the most detailed to date, providing a revealing glimpse into the hidden interior of the Red Planet...

Apple Gets Short-Term Win, But New Mysterious Fbi ­nlocking Method Looms
From ACM News

Apple Gets Short-Term Win, But New Mysterious Fbi ­nlocking Method Looms

Less than 24 hours before a highly anticipated Tuesday court session where prosecutors and Apple lawyers would have squared off here in federal court, government...

DARPA Wants to Hack Your Brain
From ACM News

DARPA Wants to Hack Your Brain

The secretive U.S. military research division DARPA has announced plans to create a device that could accelerate learning in the human brain.

Battery-Free Wearables of the Future Could Run Off Your Footsteps
From ACM TechNews

Battery-Free Wearables of the Future Could Run Off Your Footsteps

Researchers at the University of Southampton have designed an insole to sit inside a person's shoe and harvest energy from their footsteps.

Mobile-Phone Health Apps Deliver Data Bounty
From ACM News

Mobile-Phone Health Apps Deliver Data Bounty

Last summer, physician Yvonne Chan wondered how the wildfires raging through Washington state were affecting people with asthma—for whom smoke and heat can trigger...

Fbi May Not Need Apple to ­nlock San Bernardino Shooter's Iphone
From ACM News

Fbi May Not Need Apple to ­nlock San Bernardino Shooter's Iphone

The FBI may have found a way without Apple’s assistance to unlock the iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack, Justice Department...

­tah's Online Caucus Gives Security Experts Heart Attacks
From ACM News

­tah's Online Caucus Gives Security Experts Heart Attacks

Security researchers pretty much uniformly agree that letting people vote online is a very bad idea, one that is fraught with risks and vulnerabilities that could...

Long Before the Apple-Fbi Battle, Lavabit Sounded a Warning
From ACM News

Long Before the Apple-Fbi Battle, Lavabit Sounded a Warning

Three years ago, Ladar Levison, the founder of the now-defunct secure email service known as Lavabit, was in the same position Apple finds itself today: facing...

Living Factories of the Future
From ACM News

Living Factories of the Future

From an evolutionary perspective, yeast has no business producing a pain killer. But by re-engineering the microbe's genome, Christina Smolke at Stanford University...

Science Papers Reveal New Aspects of Pluto and its Moons
From ACM News

Science Papers Reveal New Aspects of Pluto and its Moons

A year ago, Pluto was just a bright speck in the cameras of NASA's approaching New Horizons spacecraft, not much different than its appearances in telescopes since...

Driverless Cars Must Have Steering Wheels, Brake Pedals, Feds Say
From ACM News

Driverless Cars Must Have Steering Wheels, Brake Pedals, Feds Say

Driverless cars should have a fairly easy time getting the green light to operate on U.S. roadways, as long as they look and act like the vehicles people have been...

The Fbi Warns That Car Hacking Is a Real Risk
From ACM News

The Fbi Warns That Car Hacking Is a Real Risk

It's been eight months since a pair of security researchers proved beyond any doubt that car hacking is more than an action movie plot device when they remotely ...

Searching for the Particle Accelerator at the Heart of the Milky Way
From ACM News

Searching for the Particle Accelerator at the Heart of the Milky Way

We're rightly proud of the Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates protons up to 7 Tera-electron Volts before smashing them together.
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