Greetings from sunny Houston. The hotels are overrun with basketball fans donning the colors of Duke, Baylor, and other colleges playing basketball here tonight. But the NCAA tournament isn’t the competition that brought DISCOVER deep in the heart of Texas.

We’re here for the Shell Eco-marathon Americas. All weekend long in downtown Houston, students from 29 universities and 9 high schools will he going head-to-head with their prototype ultra-high mileage vehicles. Most of the 50 vehicles are powered by combustion engines, but a smattering of vehicles running on ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells, solar, and petroleum gas have come down to challenge the traditional engine.

Check Discoblog over the weekend, as we’ll be continually updating on the wild cars and their brilliant young designers. Official competition runs Saturday and Sunday. However, given that winners of past eco-marathons have reached efficiencies in the thousands of miles per gallon, these vehicles might just keep on going.

If you surfed through Yahoo!’s home page this morning, you may have noticed the good news for Toyota Prius-driving men everywhere. A study by General Motors announced that 88 percent of women polled said they’d rather talk to a guy who drives a new fuel-efficient vehicle than a gas-guzzling sports car.

But hold on a second before you run out and buy a hybrid, because that number could be suspect. Self-reported survey data is known for being notoriously problematic; people want be liked, even by strangers they’ll never meet again, so they’re more likely to say what they think will impress the questioner. Green may be in style, but what the GM study may really being showing, unfortunately for heterosexual male tree-huggers, is not that women everywhere want to talk to, date, or marry environmentally responsible men. Rather, it could be that they know they’re supposed to want that.

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