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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.


The Surprising ­ses of Games Controllers
From ACM News

The Surprising ­ses of Games Controllers

Games controllers can end up in the strangest places.

Boston Researcher Cynthia Breazeal Is Ready to Bring Robots Into the Home. Are You?
From ACM Opinion

Boston Researcher Cynthia Breazeal Is Ready to Bring Robots Into the Home. Are You?

The MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group flanks the soaring atrium on the fourth floor of the Wiesner Building, a wall of metal panels along the southern edge...

Opals: Light Beams Let Data Rates Soar
From ACM News

Opals: Light Beams Let Data Rates Soar

You may know opals as fiery gemstones, but something special called OPALS is floating above us in space. On the International Space Station, the Optical Payload...

Food: The Rarely Seen Robots That Package What We Eat
From ACM News

Food: The Rarely Seen Robots That Package What We Eat

Last July, while touring a jelly bean factory, I came upon a startling sight.

An Interface For Tracking Botnets That's Fit For a Sci-Fi Starship
From ACM News

An Interface For Tracking Botnets That's Fit For a Sci-Fi Starship

What do you get when you ask a bunch of digital artists to dream up a state-of-the-art tool for fighting cybercrime?

Detecting Gases Wirelessly and Cheaply
From ACM News

Detecting Gases Wirelessly and Cheaply

MIT chemists have devised a new way to wirelessly detect hazardous gases and environmental pollutants, using a simple sensor that can be read by a smartphone.

Saturn's Moons: What a Difference a Decade Makes
From ACM News

Saturn's Moons: What a Difference a Decade Makes

Almost immediately after NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft made their brief visits to Saturn in the early 1980s, scientists were hungry for more.

STEM Cells: The Black Box of Reprogramming
From ACM News

STEM Cells: The Black Box of Reprogramming

Eggs and sperm do it when they combine to make an embryo.

Rosetta Fuels Debate on Origin of Earth's Oceans
From ACM News

Rosetta Fuels Debate on Origin of Earth's Oceans

ESA's Rosetta spacecraft has found the water vapour from its target comet to be significantly different to that found on Earth.

Tech's Lost Chapter: An Oral History of Boston's Rise and Fall
From ACM Opinion

Tech's Lost Chapter: An Oral History of Boston's Rise and Fall

In the popular telling, the dawn of personal computing begins in the summer of 1976, when Steve Wozniak showed off the Apple I at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer...

Print Thyself
From ACM News

Print Thyself

In February of 2012, a medical team at the University of Michigan's C. S. Mott Children's Hospital, in Ann Arbor, carried out an unusual operation on a three-month...

The Sun and Jupiter Could Reveal Space-Time Ripples
From ACM News

The Sun and Jupiter Could Reveal Space-Time Ripples

Ripples in space-time could squeeze and stretch the sun and Jupiter, forming a gigantic gravitational-wave detector in our own celestial backyard.

Artificial Skin That Senses, and Stretches, Like the Real Thing
From ACM News

Artificial Skin That Senses, and Stretches, Like the Real Thing

Some high-tech prosthetic limbs can be controlled by their owners, using nerves, muscles, or even the brain. However, there's no way for the wearer to tell if an...

Nasa's Curiosity Rover Finds Clues to How Water Helped Shape Martian Landscape
From ACM News

Nasa's Curiosity Rover Finds Clues to How Water Helped Shape Martian Landscape

Observations by NASA's Curiosity Rover indicate Mars' Mount Sharp was built by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years.

Titan's Giant Dunes Track Ancient Climate
From ACM News

Titan's Giant Dunes Track Ancient Climate

Long sand dunes that ripple across Saturn's moon Titan may have been there for thousands of years, results from NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggest.

'nanobuds' Could Turn Almost Any Surface Into a Touch Sensor
From ACM News

'nanobuds' Could Turn Almost Any Surface Into a Touch Sensor

Transparent films containing carbon nanobuds—molecular tubes of carbon with ball-like appendages—could turn just about any surface, regardless of its shape, into...

Sciserver: Big Data Infrastructure For Science
From ACM TechNews

Sciserver: Big Data Infrastructure For Science

Researchers are adapting tools developed for massive astronomy data sets into online big data storage and analytics tools that can be used across scientific disciplines...

On Pluto’s Doorstep, NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Encounter
From ACM News

On Pluto’s Doorstep, NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Encounter

After a voyage of nearly nine years and three billion miles—the farthest any space mission has ever traveled to reach its primary target—NASA's New Horizons spacecraft...

Who Owns the Biggest Biotech Discovery of the Century?
From ACM News

Who Owns the Biggest Biotech Discovery of the Century?

Last month in Silicon Valley, biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed up in black gowns to receive the $3 million Breakthrough Prize, a glitzy...

Baer's Odyssey: Meet the Serial Inventor Who Built the World's First Game Console
From ACM Opinion

Baer's Odyssey: Meet the Serial Inventor Who Built the World's First Game Console

Even if you're a devoted fan of video games, there's a decent chance you're not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer.
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