Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
Why Big Pharma Wants to Collect 2 Million Genomes
Five months after announcing its intentions to gather genome sequences from 2 million people, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has selected geneticist David Goldstein...
From ACM Opinion
Why Scientists Must Share Their Research Code
Many scientists worry over the reproducibility of wet-lab experiments, but data scientist Victoria Stodden's focus is on how to validate computational research:...
From ACM Opinion
Obama's Science Legacy: Betting Big on Biomedical Science
When president-elect Barack Obama chose physicist John Holdren as his top science adviser in December 2008, some biomedical researchers worried that the pick signalled...
From ACM Opinion
Take Responsibility For Electronic-Waste Disposal
The world is producing ever more electrical and electronic waste.
From ACM Opinion
The Physicist Who Studies Isis Communities Online
Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami in Florida, studies patterns that emerge in complex systems.
From ACM Opinion
Genome-Editing Revolution: My Whirlwind Year with Crispr
Some 20 months ago, I started having trouble sleeping.
From ACM Opinion
Crispr: A Path Through the Thicket
The ease of use, accuracy and efficiency of the genome-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 has led to its broad adoption in research, as well as to preliminary applications...
From ACM Opinion
Informatics: Make Sense of Health Data
If you are wondering whether exposure to some chemical could increase your chances of getting colon cancer, you could easily find supportive evidence from animal...
From ACM Opinion
Genomics Pioneer Jun Wang on His New AI Venture
Jun Wang is one of China's most famous scientists.
From ACM Opinion
Crispr Germline Engineering—the Community Speaks
With the first papers appearing in the literature that describe CRISPR-Cas9 engineering of human reproductive cells, are we at a new Asilomar moment?
From ACM Opinion
Don't Edit the Human Germ Line
It is thought that studies involving the use of genome-editing tools to modify the DNA of human embryos will be published shortly.
From ACM Opinion
Smartphones Set For Large-Scale Health Studies
Countless owners of smartphones and wearable devices are already using their devices to track their sleep, exercise, blood pressure and other measures of health...
From ACM Opinion
Satellites: Make Earth Observations Open Access
Changes in land cover affect the global climate by absorbing and reflecting solar radiation, and by altering fluxes of heat, water vapour, carbon dioxide and other...
From ACM Opinion
Academics Should Not Remain Silent on Hacking
The revelation that U.S. and British spy agencies have undermined a commonly used encryption code should alarm researchers.
From ACM Opinion
Publishing: Open Citations
When Heather Piwowar set out in May last year to investigate whether making research data publicly available increased the citation rates of articles, she never...
From ACM Opinion
Beware the Creeping Cracks of Bias
Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice. They threaten the status of science and its value to society. And they cannot be blamed...12