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
Immortal Avatars: Back Up Your Brain, Never Die
Zoe Graystone is a girl with two brains. Only one of them is human: the other is an exact digital copy that has become conscious in its own right. When the human...
From ACM TechNews
Dna Logic Gates Herald Injectable Computers
Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have developed DNA-based logic gates that could carry out calculations inside the body and may lead to injectable biocomputers...
From ACM TechNews
Impossible Figures Brought to Life in Virtual Worlds
Chinese University of Hong Kong computer scientists have developed software that depicts physically impossible images in three-dimensional virtual environments. ...
From ACM News
Wireless Revolution May Reach Inside Microchips
Wireless technology is often credited with making us more productive. Now it looks like it could also improve the inner workings of our computers. Wireless transmission...
From ACM TechNews
Teaching Robots Some Manners
People are more likely to adapt to and use robots if they behave more like humans, even if that means they operate less efficiently.
From ACM TechNews
Nanotube Transistor Will Help US Bond With Machines
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have developed a transistor, which they say could be a step toward making prosthetic devices that can be wired...
From ACM TechNews
Web Science: Exploring the Network Without Guesswork
University of Southampton professor Nigel Shadbolt, speaking at a recent conference on the emerging discipline of Web science, says the Internet has become such...
From ACM News
Crumbling Labs Could Clip Nasa's Wings
Years of neglect have left many NASA labs that might be used for breakthrough technology research in rough shape, says a report from the U.S. National Academies...
From ACM News
Why Labs Love Gaming Hardware
Blasting zombies may seem to have little to do with serious research, but video game hardware is helping scientists in a variety of ways including helping them...
From ACM TechNews
Is Water the Key to Cheaper Nanoelectronics?
Researchers have developed a way to use water to transfer layers from one surface to another by exploiting the fact that different materials have different hydrophilicity...
From ACM TechNews
What Would It Take to Put a Walking Robot on the Moon?
Astro-Technology SOHLA, a small cooperative of companies in Osaka, Japan, wants to put an autonomous humanoid robot on the moon.
From ACM News
Army of Smartphone Chips Could Emulate the Human Brain
If you have a smartphone, you probably have a slice of Steve Furber's brain in your pocket. By the time you read this, his 1-billion-neuron silicon brain will be...
From ACM News
Putting the Touch Into Touchscreens
Your eyes tell you that your hand is locked in a vice-like mechanical device, but your fingertips tell you you're stroking fur. Welcome to the world of haptics,...
From ACM TechNews
Schrodinger's Cash: Minting Quantum Money
MIT researcher Scott Aaronson has brought quantum money a step closer to reality by outlining a computationally secure quantum money scheme founded on the type...
From ACM TechNews
Robots With Skin Enter Our Touchy-Feely World
A team at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in May will circulate to various labs the first components of a touch-sensitive skin for their iCub humanoid...
From ACM TechNews
Barcodes Help Objects Tell Their Stories
Five U.K. academic institutions have collaborated to create the Tales of Things, a Web site based on the concept of the Internet of things that enables users to...
From ACM News
Robots Look to the Cloud for Enlightenment
With the phrase "web 2.0" falling out of vogue, the most exciting new uses of the internet are now all about the cloud, a term for servers invisibly doing smart...
From ACM TechNews
Hand-Held Projector Images Respond to the Real World
A prototype of a handheld projector created virtual characters that interacted with the real world at the recent Virtual Reality 2010 meeting in Waltham, MA.
From ACM News
Entangle Qubits for a True Random Number Machine
Pure randomness is surprisingly difficult to create, even if you draw on the inherent randomness of quantum mechanics. Now, though, a "true" random number generator...
From ACM News