Communications of the ACM
An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.
From ACM News
Neuron Creation in Brain's Memory Centre Stops After Childhood
Every day, the human hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory, creates hundreds of new nerve cells—or so scientists thought.
From ACM News
Latest S Weather Satellite Highlights Forecasting Challenges
The United States filled a crucial gap in its weather-forecasting arsenal when it launched its latest geostationary satellite on 1 March. The craft will enable...
From ACM News
Astronomers Detect Light from the niverse's First Stars
Astronomers have for the first time spotted long-sought signals of light from the earliest stars ever to form in the Universe—around 180 million years after the...
From ACM News
How Flashing Lights and Pink Noise Might Banish Alzheimer's, Improve Memory and More
In March 2015, Li-Huei Tsai set up a tiny disco for some of the mice in her laboratory. For an hour each day, she placed them in a box lit only by a flickering...
From ACM News
Researchers Have Finally Created a Tool to Spot Duplicated Images Across Thousands of Papers
Computer software can now quickly detect duplicate images across large swathes of the research literature, three scientists say.
From ACM News
Ocean-Wide Sensor Array Provides New Look at Global Ocean Current
The North Atlantic Ocean is a major driver of the global currents that regulate Earth's climate, mix the oceans and sequester carbon from the atmosphere—but researchers...
From ACM News
Deluge of Astronomical Data Will Soon Hit South Africa
Data scientists in South Africa are readying themselves for a flood of information that is due to crash over them when the country's biggest radio telescope doubles...
From ACM News
Physicists Harness Twisted Mathematics to Make Powerful Laser
Researchers have exploited the twisty nature of topological physics to produce a high-quality beam of laser light—a step that could lead to the first practical...
From ACM News
Data Visualization Tools Drive Interactivity and Reproducibility in Online Publishing
As Benjamin Delory started his paper documenting a new way to quantify plant morphology, he realized that one of the figures could pose a problem.
From ACM News
Physicists Create Star Wars-Style 3D Projections; Just Don't Call Them Holograms
Daniel Smalley has long dreamed of building the kind of 3D holograms that pepper science-fiction films.
From ACM Careers
China Declared World's Largest Producer of Scientific Articles
For the first time, China has overtaken the United States in terms of the total number of science publications, according to statistics compiled by the US National...
From ACM News
How to See a Memory
For someone who's not a Sherlock superfan, cognitive neuroscientist Janice Chen knows the BBC's hit detective drama better than most.
From ACM News
Nasa Test Proves Pulsars Can Function as a Celestial Gps
From its perch aboard the International Space Station, a NASA experiment has shown how future missions might navigate their way through deep space.
From ACM News
Silicon Gains Ground in Quantum-Computing Race
In the next few weeks, a research group at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands expects to receive an important package. Its contents promise to...
From ACM News
Deep Learning Sharpens Views of Cells and Genes
Eyes are said to be the window to the soul—but researchers at Google see them as indicators of a person's health.
From ACM News
Could Bitcoin Technology Help Science?
The much-hyped technology behind Bitcoin, known as blockchain, has intoxicated investors around the world and is now making tentative inroads into science, spurred...
From ACM News
Supercomputing Poised For a Massive Speed Boost
At the end of July, workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee began filling up a cavernous room with the makings of a computational behemoth: row...
From ACM News
'alien' Dna Makes Proteins in Living Cells For the First Time
Life has spent the past few billion years working with a narrow vocabulary. Now researchers have broken those rules, adding extra letters to biology's limited lexicon...
From ACM Opinion
How an nderwater Sensor Network Is Tracking Argentina's Lost Submarine
On 15 November, Argentina's Navy lost contact with the ARA San Juan, a small diesel-powered submarine that had been involved in exercises off the east coast of...
From ACM News