Members of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, have elected new officers who will lead the organization for two-year terms beginning July 1. Heading the new team will be incoming President Elisa Bertino. Bertino is the Samuel Conte Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. Over her 40-year career, she has made pioneering contributions to information and systems security and privacy. She is known for broadening participation in computing through professional leadership and mentoring.

Massive volumes of digital data are generated every day from AI training, big data analytics and smart devices. As conventional hard drives and cloud storage are increasingly constrained by high costs, limited capacity, high power consumption and short lifespans, molecular data storage has emerged as a breakthrough storage alternative. Researchers at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) have pioneered a method that uses engineered proteins to store digital data and, for the first time, completed the full process from data storage to data retrieval in de novo designed unnatural proteins. This demonstrates the potential of establishing a protein-based storage framework with sustainability, high storage capacity and high stability, offering a promising solution to the explosive AI-generated growth in data globally.

Researchers with the University of Cincinnati and Johns Hopkins Medicine developed a potential treatment for brain cancer that uses nanofibers embedded with a combination of drugs that work in concert to target tumors.

The cradles of baby stars have a wheel-and-spoke like shape, with streams of gas converging toward a dense central hub. Using 3D simulations, researchers from Kyushu University and Nagoya University found that when an external shockwave strikes a gas cloud with a pinched magnetic field, it reorganizes the cloud into radial filaments. These findings open a new window into the environments where massive stars and star clusters are born.