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Ars Technica Live, episode 1: Meat. (video link)

Welcome to the first episode of Ars Technica Live, a monthly series of in-depth interviews with people working at the intersections of technology, science, and culture. In this episode, your Ars hosts Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar interviewed Stanford anthropologist Krish Seetah about his research on the deep history of butchery before a live audience at Longitude, a tiki bar in Oakland, California. Seetah gave us a fascinating look at how the technologies and morality of butchery have shaped humanity for millions of years—and our discussion inspired an intense debate with some of the attendees.

Butchery evolved before humans

Seetah's first job when he was growing up in the neighborhood of Brixton in London was as a butcher's assistant. He told us about how his many years as a butcher shaped his understanding of meat and ultimately became a major part of his interests as a scholar. He's worked on studies that look at early humans' relationships with animals, as well as the technologies we've developed from animal products like wool, and he is now working on a book-length project about the early history of butchery. He pointed out immediately that there is evidence that the ancestors of Homo sapiens were butchering animals with stone tools nearly 2.5 million years ago. That's long before our ancestors invented fire and, indeed, long before Homo sapiens evolved some 200,000 years ago.

HP

HP's all-metal Chromebook 13 is evocative of the Chromebook Pixel.

6 more images in gallery

People who like Chrome OS but don't like the cheap low-end hardware it normally comes on or the expensive, aging Chromebook Pixel take note: HP and Google have announced a new 13-inch Chromebook that includes many of the Pixel's best features, but does it for a starting price of $499. That's half the $999 starting price of the Pixel, though it's still about twice as expensive as the cheapest Chromebooks.

The Chromebook 13's specs definitely deliver, though you'll need to drop more money to get the really impressive specs. It's got an aluminum enclosure with a soft-touch material on the bottom, and its rounded hinge is more than a little evocative of the Pixel. Higher-end models have a 3200×1800 IPS display, even higher than the 2560×1700 of the Pixel, while lower-end models get a still-reasonable 1080p panel. It has two USB Type-C ports for charging, data, and display output, which also makes it compatible with HP's Elite USB-C Docking Station (PDF), and it includes one standard USB Type-A port for compatibility with existing accessories.

Base models use 4GB of RAM, though 8GB and 16GB configurations are also available, and all models include 32GB of internal eMMC storage and an SD card reader. It also uses a range of Skylake Core M processors, from the Pentium 4405Y at the low end to the m7-6Y75 at the high end. All of these chips ought to provide more performance than the cheaper Atom-derived Celeron and Pentium chips in cheaper Chromebooks but should still allow for a fanless design while maintaining decent performance. It's 0.51 inches (12.9mm) thick, comparable to other Core M laptops, and it weighs 2.89 pounds (1.29 kg). 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 round out the wireless capabilities, and HP promises 11.5 hours of battery life while browsing.

(credit: Flickr)

Sony shipped 17.7 million PlayStation 4 consoles over the fiscal year ended March 31, bringing the total number of consoles shipped to an impressive 40 million. The strength of the PS4 helped Sony to reach its first full-year profit in three years, bringing in ¥‎147.8 billion (£936 million, $1.36 billion). Last year the company reported a loss of ¥126 billion (£798 million, $1.16 billion).

Strong demand for the PS4 and games led to an 11.8 percent jump in sales for Sony's Game and Network Services division. Interestingly, Sony's PlayStation Network alone brought in ¥529 billion (£3.3 billion, $4.9 billion) in raw sales, which is more than the whole of Nintendo brought in (¥504 million, £3.1 billion, $4.6 billion) for its last fiscal year.

While Sony's new-found profitability marks a dramatic turnaround for a company that has struggled to deliver consistent profits over the past decade, not all of it is performing well. Breaking it down by quarter, Sony actually made a ¥88.3 billion (£559 million, $816 million) loss in its fourth quarter, booking a charge against its chip business, as well as assessing damage from an earthquake that shut down its main plant for camera sensors.

Enlarge (credit: Tobias Lortzing)

Nature is, it’s often said, red in tooth and claw. But sometimes a claw scratches someone’s back in return for a symbiotic scratch of one’s own. Ants provide many examples of such mutually beneficial arrangements. As weird as it sounds, drinking the “blood” of a wounded bittersweet nightshade plant appears to be one of them.

Ants and plants are often good friends (leafcutters aside) because ants prey on insects that munch on the plants. Some plants keep ants on retainer by secreting nectar from special structures (fittingly called “nectaries”) that can be found in various parts of the plant. The acacia tree even goes as far as growing hollow thorns that ants can nest inside when they aren’t dining on the gourmet ant food the tree provides. (Full disclosure: acacias also drug the ants so they can’t live off other food sources. It’s a complicated relationship...) The benefits the tree obtains from its ant security detail apparently outweigh the energetic costs of these lavish gifts.

Something a little more subtle is going on with the bittersweet nightshade plant. A group of researchers led by Tobias Lortzing of the Free University of Berlin noticed that this nightshade bleeds sugary droplets when damaged, rather than quickly closing up its wounds. Seeing ants hit up those droplets for a snack, they wondered whether the plant adapted to call in ant support when herbivores come a-munching.

Enlarge / Google Play on Windows! It could happen some day. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Microsoft / Google)

Earlier this week, some Chrome OS code surfaced that suggested the Google Play Store would bring "millions" of Android apps to Chrome OS. Google has experimented with Android apps on Chrome OS, but now it seems poised to unleash the full collection of Android apps onto the "browser only" operating system. There's no official word from Google on how this will play out, but the very architecture of Google's Android-apps-on-Chrome OS implementation opens some interesting possibilities.

The feature is possible because of the "App Runtime for Chrome (ARC)," a project that implements the Android runtime on top of Chrome's "Native Client" extension architecture. Native Client is a Chrome sandboxing technology that was designed with performance and portability in mind, allowing plugins to run at "near native" speeds by taking full advantage of the system's CPU and GPU. ARC took a big step last year when it added support for the Google Play Services APIs, which many Play Store apps depend on to work.

The Play Store on Chrome OS would open Google Play apps to a new form factor (horrible Android laptops notwithstanding), but it could also be the tip of the iceberg. Remember, ARC is just a Chrome extension, so it works everywhere desktop Chrome works. If the full Google Play Store comes to ARC, it would be possible for it to work on not just Chrome OS, but also Chrome's other host desktop operating systems: Windows, OS X, and Linux.

The Web browser is likely the most used piece of software on the average computing device. Yet despite its ubiquity, there is relatively little competition in the browser space. These days even experienced users would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the major offerings. Internet Explorer's new Edge incarnation is slightly different, but Firefox, Chrome, and even Opera are indistinguishable both in appearance and features available.

There may be some small differences, but for the most part a Web browser is a Web browser is a Web browser.

This is especially true when there's no Web browser. The rise of the embedded browser in mobile apps has very nearly eliminated the need for a dedicated one if you spend most of your time in mobile applications. But the disappearance of the browser is not a bad thing. The point after all is not the browser—it's the Web it accesses.