Month: January 2020

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  The 2020 Corolla Hybrid isn't fast or exciting, but it is affordable and efficient. [credit: Toyota ]

On Tuesday, I wrote about the week I spent with the current Toyota Prius Prime. Today, you get to read about another Toyota hybrid, the 2020 Corolla Hybrid, which I drove for 10 days immediately following my week with the plug-in Prius. The two cars actually have a lot in common. They use the same TNGA architecture, the same four-cylinder Atkinson-cycle internal combustion engine, the same electric motor, and the same continuously variable transmission. Like the Prius Prime, the Corolla offers a combined output of 121hp (90kW), with 71hp (53kW) of that from the electric motor. It also has the same amount of torque—105lb-ft (142Nm).

But the Corolla isn't a plug-in, and it uses a nickel-metal hydride battery to feed the electric motor, the same as the regular Prius. That means it's lighter on its tires, with a curb weight of 3,050lbs (1,384kg). And it's significantly cheaper—at $23,100 it is more than $1,000 cheaper than the least expensive Prius, other than the subcompact Prius C. It also looks extremely normal compared to the current Prius. Unremarkably normal, in fact, particularly in the white paint—if you're looking for a car to surveil or conduct a stake-out, this could well be it.

Open the door, step inside, and the unremarkable normality continues. The main instrument display is right in front of you, not offset up to the right on the dash. It's a 7-inch digital display, flanked on either side by analogue dials, and everything is clear and understandable. There's a conventional gearstick that pokes up from the center console. The infotainment system is Toyota's standard Entune 3.0, with an 8-inch touchscreen that also offers Sirius XM and Apple Carplay—that comes in very handy because there is no built-in navigation or GPS here, although Android (and iOS) users can download the Scout GPS Link app and use their phones to find the way.

Enlarge / One of the spectacular feather fossils that has been sitting in a museum's sample collection for decades. (credit: Melbourne Museum)

Researchers have described ten fossil feathers from the polar regions of the former continent Gondwana for the first time. The collection, documented in a recent paper in Gondwana Research, contains a highly diverse array of feathers collected from the 118 million-year-old Koonwarra Fossil Bed in Victoria, Australia. 

The paper describes what is potentially the earliest evidence of a flight feather, and the first-ever non-avian dinosaur feathers found within the Antarctic Circle. It also documents dark coloration and insulating branching structures on some of the feathers, providing valuable insight into how polar dinosaurs might have stayed warm during long, dark winters. 

The fossils were initially discovered in the 1960s, but most of the technologies and knowledge used to understand the feathers described in this study didn’t yet exist at that point. Since then, they were tucked away in a drawer in the Melbourne Museum for decades, until lead author Martin Kundrát happened across an old paper in 2012 that described one of the feathers. 

Enlarge (credit: Rdsmith4 / Wikimedia)

Feeling the pressure from competing browser developers, Google on Tuesday laid out a plan to drop Chrome support of tracking cookies within two years.

The plan is laid out in a post titled "Building a more private Web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete." It articulates a shift from a stance Chrome developers took in August, when they warned that the blocking of support for third-party cookies—which allow advertisers to track people as they move from site to site—would encourage the use of an alternative tracking method. Known as browser fingerprinting, it collects small characteristics of a browser—for instance, installed fonts or plugins, screen size, and browser version—to uniquely identify the person using it. Unlike cookies, fingerprinting is harder to detect, and user profiles can't be easily deleted.

Instead, Google's August post unveiled the "privacy sandbox," a proposed set of open standards that would serve as an alternative to the blocking of third-party cookies. Privacy sandbox uses browser-based machine learning and other techniques to determine user interests and aggregate them with other users. Google—whose ad-driven revenue model strongly favors ads that target individuals' interests and demographics—said the proposed standard would allow advertisers to deliver more relevant ads without allowing them to track individual users.