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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 Big Business of Selling Prescription-Drug Records
From ACM News

The Big Business of Selling Prescription-Drug Records

Since the days of 19th century remedies such as castor oil laxatives and mercury syphilis tablets, pharmacists and patients have had a tacit understanding: Whatever...

How to Fool a Computer With Optical Illusions
From ACM News

How to Fool a Computer With Optical Illusions

Computers, like people, understand what they see in the world based on what they've seen before.

Comet Lander's Location Still Eludes Scientists
From ACM News

Comet Lander's Location Still Eludes Scientists

More than a month after the Philae spacecraft bounced to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, European Space Agency scientists still have not been able...

Bots Now Outnumber Humans on the Web
From ACM News

Bots Now Outnumber Humans on the Web

Diogo Mónica once wrote a short computer script that gave him a secret weapon in the war for San Francisco dinner reservations.

Amputee Simultaneously Controls Two Prosthetic Arms with His Mind
From ACM News

Amputee Simultaneously Controls Two Prosthetic Arms with His Mind

Replacement limbs that completely replicate the functions and abilities of real limbs are the current white whale of prosthetics, and we're getting closer: mind...

Thought Control Makes Robot Arm Grab and Move Objects
From ACM News

Thought Control Makes Robot Arm Grab and Move Objects

A woman paralysed from the neck down can now grab a ball with a robotic arm—just by thinking about it.

Nasa Rover Finds Active and Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars
From ACM News

Nasa Rover Finds Active and Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a...

Venus Express Goes Gently Into the Night
From ACM News

Venus Express Goes Gently Into the Night

ESA's Venus Express has ended its eight-year mission after far exceeding its planned life. The spacecraft exhausted its propellant during a series of thruster burns...

­ndersea Robot Explores Life Below Arctic Ice
From ACM News

­ndersea Robot Explores Life Below Arctic Ice

While 2014 has not been kind to rockets, it has been a banner year for robots of all stripes.

Innovators of Intelligence Look to Past
From ACM News

Innovators of Intelligence Look to Past

Inside the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, known as AI2, everything is a gleaming architectural white.

NASA Voyager: 'Tsunami Wave' Still Flies Through Interstellar Space
From ACM News

NASA Voyager: 'Tsunami Wave' Still Flies Through Interstellar Space

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced three shock waves. The most recent shock wave, first observed in February 2014, still appears to be going on. One wave,...

Robobrain: The World's First Knowledge Engine For Robots
From ACM News

Robobrain: The World's First Knowledge Engine For Robots

One of the most exciting changes influencing modern life is the ability to search and interact with information on a scale that has never been possible before.

DARPA Offers Free Watson-Like Artificial Intelligence
From ACM TechNews

DARPA Offers Free Watson-Like Artificial Intelligence

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has unveiled an open source version of IBM's Watson named DeepDive. The system's performance was ahead of or...

Material Question
From ACM News

Material Question

 Until Andre Geim, a physics professor at the University of Manchester, discovered an unusual new material called graphene, he was best known for an experiment...

Signs of Ancient Mars Lakes and Quakes Seen in New Map
From ACM News

Signs of Ancient Mars Lakes and Quakes Seen in New Map

Long ago, in the largest canyon system in our solar system, vibrations from "marsquakes" shook soft sediments that had accumulated in Martian lakes.

Watson Wannabes: 4 Open Source Projects For Machine Intelligence
From ACM TechNews

Watson Wannabes: 4 Open Source Projects For Machine Intelligence

Four groups have been developing IBM Watson-like systems based on open source work.

Dumbing It Down in the Cockpit
From ACM Opinion

Dumbing It Down in the Cockpit

Long gone are the leather jackets, goggles, and silk scarves flung over the shoulders of aviators who wrestled with flight controls, furiously scanned instruments...

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...

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?
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