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
P ? Np? It's Bad News For the Power of Computing
Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sentdraft...
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
Babbage Nanomachine Promises Low-Energy Computing
Boston University researchers have created a nanoscale mechanical logic gate that could form the basis of tiny mechanical computers, descendants of Babbage's mechanical...
From ACM News
Cellphone Traces Reveal You're So Predictable
We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the traces left by 50,000 cellphone users over three months has conclusively proved otherwise...
From ACM News
.s. Networks and Power Grid nder (mock) Cyber-Attack
Unknown hackers have taken out U.S. cellphone networks in an ongoing cyber-attack that will soon knock out parts of the nation's electricity grid – say the officials...
From ACM TechNews
Organic Crystals Promise Low-Power Green Computing
Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have discovered ferroelectric behavior in crystalline croconic acid, which...
From ACM News
Smart Dust Could Give Early Warning of Space Storms
A SWARM of "smart dust" spacecraft, positioned at a sweet spot between the Earth and the sun, could alert us to the approach of dangerous space storms well before...
From ACM News
Unplugged: Goodbye Cables, Hello Energy Beams
LET'S face it: power cables are unsightly dust-traps. PCs, TVs and music players are becoming slicker every year, but the nest of vipers in the corner of everyAn...
From ACM News
Spasers Set to Sum: A New Dawn For Optical Computing
It's a laser, but not as we know it. For a start, you need a microscope to see it. Gleaming eerily green, a "spaser" is a single spherical particle just a few tens...
From ACM News
Touchscreen Merges the Real and Digital Worlds
For all the advances in table-top and tablet computing, some design professionals will always prefer the feel of pen on paper to stylus on glass. A new device could...
From ACM News
Microsoft's Body-Sensing, Button-Busting Controller
A LONG-lived videogaming skill could be on the way out this year as Microsoft hones an add-on to its Xbox 360 console aimed at making button-studded games controllers...
From ACM TechNews
Learning to Love to Hate Robots
Several studies have recently been conducted to determine how humans and robots interact and how to improve the human-robot relationship. For example, a Carnegie...
From ACM News
Medibots: The World's Smallest Surgeons
A man lies comatose on an operating table. The enormous spider that hangs above him has plunged four appendages into his belly. The spider, made of white steel,...
From ACM TechNews
Free-Flying Cyborg Insects Steered From a Distance
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have connected electrodes and radio antennas to the nervous systems of beetles and then were able to control...
From ACM TechNews
Augmented Reality Gets Off to a Wobbly Start
Although the iPhone can superimpose navigation routes or reviews on top of real-time images, augmented reality (AR) still has a long way to go. The iPhone's application...
From ACM News
Quantum Computers Are Coming
WHATEVER happened to quantum computers? A few years ago, it seemed, it was just a case of a tweak here, a fiddle there, and some kind of number-crunching Godzilla...
From ACM TechNews
Get to Hospital to See the Future
Modern hospitals provide a glimpse into how people will interact with machines in the future, according to a new Gartner report on the future of human-computer...
From ACM TechNews
'spiderbots' Talk Amongst Themselves Inside Active Volcano
A group of "spiderbots" released inside Mount St. Helens in Washington is the first network of volcano sensors capable of automatically communicating with each...
From ACM TechNews
Smart Machines: What's The Worst That Could Happen?
A panel of 25 artificial intelligence (AI) scientists, roboticists, and ethical and legal scholars have spent the past year discussing the risks of developing machines...
From ACM TechNews