Adobe's got a video out that proves the HP Slate can run Flash and AIR just fine, thankyouverymuch. To which we say: no kidding! It's a Windows 7 device. What's of some concern might be HP's own marketing clip:
The Adobe clip shows real-use situations with Flash, and it looks great. The HP clip, though, is totally rendered: screen, hand, everything fake.
There could be lots of reasons for that, of course. But hopefully it's not that HP doesn't trust its Slate enough yet to film actual behavior.
Also making a debut appearance, in the first video: the Slate's on-screen keyboard, which doesn't seem to have solved any of the problems the iPad's poses.
Apple may have a head start with the iPad, but HP's clearly staking out their tablet territory by stressing Flash so heavily this early. Let's hope it plays as well in real life as it does in simulations. [Engadget]
“Malaria and alcohol consumption both represent major public health problems. Alcohol consumption is rising in developing countries and, as efforts to manage malaria are expanded, understanding the links between malaria and alcohol consumption becomes crucial. Our aim was to ascertain the effect of beer consumption on human attractiveness to malaria mosquitoes in semi field conditions in Burkina Faso. We used a Y tube-olfactometer designed to take advantage of the whole body odour (breath and skin emanations) as a stimulus to gauge human attractiveness to Anopheles gambiae (the primary African malaria vector) before and after volunteers consumed either beer (n = 25 volunteers and a total of 2500 mosquitoes tested) or water (n = 18 volunteers and a total of 1800 mosquitoes). Water consumption had no effect on human attractiveness to An. gambiae mosquitoes, but beer consumption increased volunteer attractiveness. Body odours of volunteers who consumed beer increased mosquito activation (proportion of mosquitoes engaging in take-off and up-wind flight) and orientation (proportion of mosquitoes flying towards volunteers’ odours). The level of exhaled carbon dioxide and body temperature had no effect on human attractiveness to mosquitoes. Despite individual volunteer variation, beer consumption consistently increased attractiveness to mosquitoes. These results suggest that beer consumption is a risk factor for malaria and needs to be integrated into public health policies for the design of control measures.”
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RIP XPS
Google meddles in just about everything on your phone and computer—think Google Voice, searches, Chrome, and all that jazz. Now the search engine company might hop over to your TV with a programming search service it's been testing.
Hot, cold, in between, it doesn’t really matter to chameleons: They’re going to snare their prey anyway, according to 
The key is how the chameleon launches its collagen assassin. Measuring twice the creature’s body length, the tongue stays coiled inside until needed. While a muscle must initiate the tongue’s unfurling, momentum takes over after that impetus. “This ‘bow and arrow’ mechanism decouples muscle contraction temporally from tongue launch and thereby allows kinetic energy to be imparted to the tongue at a rate far exceeding that possible via direct muscle contraction,” the team writes. That also explains why the chameleons’ tongue recoil speed, which depends on muscle contraction, was much slower when the temperature dropped, slowing between 42 and 63 percent.
