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Despite the upcoming oil shortage, the government is giving a special tax cut to businesses that purchase large trucks and SUVs. If gas prices are going to keep climbing, auto makers will have a harder and harder time selling these behemoths. So why don’t they sell more smaller cars instead? Because big SUVs are the only vehicles that make a profit.

Dan Lienert writes for Forbes.com that automakers lose money on cars that sell for under $30,000. This information is hard to come by: “At one time, we did have info from the dealers on what they sold,” says Mike Greywitt, of J.D. Power and Associates. “They were indicating how much profit they were making on each car. It’s not being made public now.”
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In Tuesday’s California vote for governor, one county cast their ballots on computerizedvoting machines that are easy to hack. Election officials want to avoid hanging chads, but the real problem is that a poll worker or an outsider could change the vote on these machines without being detected.

Kim Zetter writes in wired.com that Alameda County uses 4,000 touch-screen voting machines manufactured by Diebold. But last month, Maryland officials released a report saying the machines are “at high risk of compromise” due to security flaws in the software, allowing the votes to be changed as officials transmit them electronically.
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It’s the Nobel prize season, and the Ig Nobels are being awarded as well. One Ig Nobel was awarded for a study showing that chickens like beautiful humans, by allowing them to peck at the portraits they prefer. More animal researchers won awards?one for a study of duck homosexual necrophilia (having sex with dead ducks) and another for a chemical analysis of a Japanese statue that repels pigeons.
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Being smart isn’t always successful in the evolutionary race. Swiss researchers wondered why, if intelligence is such an asset, we haven’t evolved to the point where everyone is super smart. Since this hasn’t happened, there must be some good reasons to be dumb. Scottish researchers have discovered that it pays to be smart if you’re poor, but if you’re rich, it doesn’t make any difference.

Debora MacKenzie writes in New Scientist that when Frederic Mery compared smart fruit flies with dumb ones, the unintelligent flies did better. “This shows that just having a better ability to learn involves a cost, even when you aren’t using it,” Mery says.
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