Month: May 2019

• 

  The 2019 Toyota Corolla Hatchback. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

I'll admit to being a little trepidatious reviewing the Toyota Corolla Hatchback. I didn't exactly gel with the new Camry, and the two cars share the same underpinnings. Not that Toyota needs my approval—as with the Camry, people will buy the Corolla regardless of what any journalist says about it.

Toyota wouldn't be where it is today without this car, which is now in its twelfth generation. The company has sold at least 43 million Corollas, and the name may as well be a synonym for "people's car" at this point; its sales surpassed the Volkswagen Beetle more than 20 years ago. The Camry might have been Toyota's biggest US hit, but beyond these shores, in places where average salaries and parking spaces are much smaller, the Corolla has filled the niche of an affordable, reliable, dependable little car. And when the $23,140 Corolla Hatchback XSE arrived here for testing, it won some instant brownie points for having three pedals. Yes, Internet people, break out the party balloons: you can still get this one without an automatic transmission.

This latest Corolla is all-new, derived from the Toyota Next Generation Architecture (TNGA). That's the toolbox of assemblies and subcomponents that has also given us the aforementioned Camry, Avalon, RAV4, and the current Prius. The Corolla is a small car, measuring 169.9 inches (4,315mm) long, 69.9 inches (1,775mm) wide, and 57.1 inches (1,450mm) high. That actually makes it a tiny bit shorter (in both length and height) than the outgoing model, but the wheelbase is 1.5 inches (38mm) longer. This translates into some extra room for stuff in the back.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Sometimes the default just doesn't cut it, and that's often true when it comes to keyboards. Whether you're working on a desktop or a laptop, the keyboard you were given or the keyboard built into the machine may not be the best for your working style. If that's the case, you may benefit from re-organizing your workspace to fit a wireless keyboard that connects to your machine via Bluetooth or a USB receiver.

But there are scores of wireless keyboards to choose from these days. Big PC companies as well as big accessory manufacturers all make wireless keyboards for various kinds of uses from stationary desk typing to on-the-go working. Luckily, we recently dove into the vast world of wireless keyboards head first. Maybe a modern wireless keyboard will never be as beloved as your old Model M, but there are good options out there—and here's the info you'll need to make your buying decisions easier.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge / The Rocket Report is published weekly. (credit: Arianespace)

Welcome to Edition 1.49 of the Rocket Report! Another week has come and gone, and we find ourselves in the middle of May. For Houston, where this report originates, this essentially means the beginning of summer. But for those of you in cooler climates, we hope there's plenty of news herein to warm your hearts.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Vega rocket preps for rideshare launch. Arianespace has finalized a payload of 42 satellites for a Vega launch as early as September, company officials said. "We are fully booked. We have no gram left of performance," Marino Fragnito, vice president of the Vega business unit at Arianespace, said during a panel discussion at the Satellite 2019 conference, SpaceNews reports.

Enlarge

Tea drinkers know all too well that annoying dribble from the kettle spout that so often occurs as one pours a nice refreshing cuppa. It's even known as the "teapot effect," and it usually happens when the tea is poured too slowly. Potters usually design their pots—giving the spout a thin lip, for instance—to reduce the likelihood of dribbling, based on centuries of accrued knowledge derived from trial and error.

Now a group of Dutch physicists has come up with quantitative model to accurately predict the precise flow rate for how much (or how little) a teapot will dribble as it pours, described in a recent paper in Physical Review Letters. The model accurately describes both the simple teapot effect and more complex behavior—notably, the formation of a helix as a water stream swirls around a cylinder. That should be a boon not to just for teapot design, but for 3D printing and similar industrial applications, which are also plagued by inconvenient dribbling.

Physicists have long been fascinated by the phenomenon. The late Stanford engineer and mathematician Joseph B. Keller once recalled attending a lecture by an Israeli scientist who mentioned that he'd posed the question of why teapots dribble to 100 physicists. All opined that it must be due to surface tension, but when the Israeli scientist performed experiments to test that theory, this proved not to be the case.