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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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After studying at the last 11,000 years of solar activity, astrophysicist Mark Clilverd says the sun’s contribution to climate change on Earth will reduce slightly over the next 100 years. For the past century, we’ve had large numbers of solar flares, sunspots and geomagnetic storms, all of which increase global warming.

The sun’s contribution to the increase in Earth temperatures is estimated to be between 4 and 20%, with greenhouse gases making up the remaining 80%. Clilverd thinks the number of space storms will decline by two thirds. He says, “This work is speculative and relies on the idea that the sun shows regular cycles of activity on time scales of 10 to 10,000 years and that its heat output and activity are related.”
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