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
Maths Quiz Helps Paralyzed People Talk With Their Eyes
Giving fully conscious but paralysed people hard sums to do might seem like adding insult to injury. But because such brain teasers make the pupils of the eyes...
From ACM News
Overprotection May Be Hampering Hunt For Mars Life
There are aliens on Mars—and they came from Earth.
From ACM News
Submarine Internet Cables Are a Gift For Spooks
It's a golden age for spying. The subsea fibre-optic cables that carry telephone and Internet traffic are a technological marvel—and a gift to intelligence agencies...
From ACM News
Echolocating App Will Let You Map a Room with Sound
Bats, dolphins, and even some blind people use echoes to create a mental 3D map of their environment and where they are in it. A smartphone's chirp could soon let...
From ACM News
Kepler Telescope's Planet-Hunting Days Crunch to a Close
"Kepler was my North, my South, my East and West, my working week, no weekend rest, my noon, my midnight, my talks, my song; I thought Kepler would last forever...
From ACM News
Curiosity's Discoveries Hint at Life's Cradle on Mars
NASA's Curiosity rover has found what it was looking for in its very first taste of Martian rock—much to everyone's surprise.
From ACM News
The Father of All Men Is 340,000 Years Old
Albert Perry carried a secret in his DNA: a Y chromosome so distinctive that it reveals new information about the origin of our species.
From ACM News
Kinect Sensor Poised to Leap Into Everyday Life
When Microsoft's Kinect gaming sensor first exploded onto the gaming scene in 2010, it wasn't long before people started getting excited about what it might make...
From ACM Opinion
'biology Is a Manufacturing Capability'
Soon we'll be able to engineer living things with mechanical precision, says Tom Knight, father of synthetic biology.
From ACM TechNews
How Metadata Brought Down CIA Boss David Petraeus
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency director David Petraeus was brought down by metadata, which is not covered by the Stored Communications Act.
From ACM News
Will We Ever nderstand How Our Brains Work?
When it comes to the human brain, many scientists believe that we are incapable of understanding how it works because we lack the tools and intelligence to measure...
From ACM Opinion
Patent Could Shackle 3D Printers with Drm
One of the greatest benefits of 3D printing technology—the ability to make replacements or parts for household objects like toys, utensils and gadgets—may be denied...
From ACM News
Graphics Chips Are For More Than Just Eye Candy
Chances are there is a graphics chip in your desktop computer, and it is fuelling a revolution.
From ACM News
The Real Tron: It Security As a Shoot 'em p
Alert to a sudden threat, you race down a virtual corridor of servers, hot on the tail of malicious software.
From ACM News
Watson Turns Medic: Supercomputer to Diagnose Disease
It is more than a year since Watson, IBM's famous supercomputer, opened a new frontier for artificial intelligence by beating human champions of the quiz show Jeopardy...
From ACM TechNews
Patent Trawler Aims to Predict Next Hot Technologies
Hungarian Academy of Sciences researchers have developed a data-mining tool that automatically helps predict emerging technologies.
From ACM TechNews
The AI Game That Knows You Better Than Anyone
Many computer science researchers are trying to create an AI system that offers video game players a more tailored experience.
From ACM News
Online Friendships Light p Shadow Social Networks
Friending someone on Facebook makes an association public, but many relationships are never professed online.
From ACM TechNews
Font for Digits Lets Numbers Punch Their Weight
Researchers at the St. Andrews and Calgary universities have developed FatFonts, a font that offers a way to write numbers so that their areas equal their numerical...
From ACM TechNews