The partying heiress is apparently a poker aficionado, and says she always wins the game in Vegas. But the buzz is that she doesn?t always win ? and actually lost her beloved Bentley ? valued at over $150,000 ? in a recent game, according to various reports. But now an online poker company is offering Hilton a chance to win a new Bently. ?If she goes heads-up online in a no-limit Texas Hold'em challenge against poker legend Mike Sexton and wins we?ll hand her the keys to a brand spanking new Bentley,? PartyPoker.com spokesman Warren Lush told the Hamilton Spectator. ?Forget one night in Paris, we're offering her one night to win her wheels back.?

Almost 80 percent of crashes and 65 percent of near-crashes happen within three seconds of some form of driver distraction, according to the report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

The two research groups monitored the behavior of 241 drivers in 100 vehicles for more than a year. During the 2 million miles of the study, the drivers were involved in 82 crashes and 761 near-crashes.

Reaching for a moving object multiplied the risk of a crash or near-crash by nine times, according to the study. Reading, applying makeup, or dialing a handheld device tripled the risk.

"All of these activities are much more dangerous than we thought before," Dr. Charlie Klauer, a senior research associate at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, was quoted as saying by The Associated Press.

That's what the Gulf Station on Old Fulton St. in Brooklyn Heights was charging credit card customers for a gallon of premium yesterday.

A gallon of regular gas was no bargain, either, at $4.14 for cash or $4.26 on plastic.

"That's crazy," said Mike Charles, 49, after gawking at the astronomical rates. "I've never seen gas prices like that before."

"There's no way I'd ever pay that much," he added. "I don't care how badly I needed gas."

Cars tells the story of Lightning McQueen, a hotshot rookie racecar driven to succeed, who discovers that life is about the journey, not the finish line, when he finds himself unexpectedly detoured in the sleepy Route 66 town of Radiator Springs. On route across the country to the big Piston Cup Championship in California to compete against two seasoned pros, McQueen gets to know the town's offbeat characters who help him realize that there are more important things than trophies, fame and sponsorship. The all-star vocal cast includes free-wheeling performances by Paul Newman, Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, "Larry the Cable Guy", Tony Shalhoub, Michael Keaton, George Carlin, Katherine Helmond, Cheech Marin, John Ratzenberger, Paul Dooley, Michael Wallis, Darrell Waltrip, Richard Petty, Jenifer Lewis and Jeremy Piven. Fueled with plenty of humor, action, heartfelt drama, and amazing new technical feats,

The supercharged car can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in only 3.4 seconds, and its engine produces 480 horsepower at 6,000 rpm - 60 horsepower more than its predecessor.

With a sticker price of more than $122,000, it's not for everyone. But the company is hopeful its 911 Turbo will continue to draw in elite customers.

"It really is in the last 1 percent of the market. It's very much a car for the visible achievers. It's very much car for technology aficionados," said Michael Bartsch, executive vice president and chief operations officer at Porsche Cars North America.

The Energy Department says it expects the price of regular to average $2.62 a gallon, 25 cents more than last summer, over the April-September driving period. But prices around the country already are above that.

"Look, it's $41 to fill it up," complained Lorenzo Rivera, 26, a restaurant manager, as he pumped mid-level gas Tuesday at $3.05 a gallon at a Chevron station near the Watergate complex in Northwest Washington. Across the street at an ExxonMobil station, regular grade was going for $3.09 - and there weren't many customers.

Ervin Goodall, 56, a professional driver pumping supreme grade into his large sedan, was paying $3.29 a gallon. "It's lot higher than last year, a bigger hit," said Goodall, who added that when it comes to personal driving he's scaling back ? no more Saturday day trips.

Guy Caruso, head of the Energy Department's statistical agency, said prices at the pump, which averaged $2.68 a gallon last week nationwide, are likely to increase 10 to 15 cents a gallon in the coming weeks, peak in May and drop off in late summer. He said the national average can mask local price spikes.

Not surprisingly, the TRG ratings show that vehicle manufacturers that tend to sell luxury vehicles are including more safety and entertainment features than economy car maker Hyundai, which ranked last.

However, Lincoln, and Volvo's appearance along with Ford at the bottom was a bit of a surprise. Dodge and Toyota, and Chevy, which have vehicles at a wide variety of price ranges all were in the middle of the pack.

A fledging Las Vegas-based company called Hybrid Technologies thinks it has the solution. Hybrid will launch a car it calls LiX-75 at the New York Auto Show on Apr.14. The sleek, $125,000 sports car runs off of electric batteries, boosted by solar panels on the trunk. It recharges in four to six hours from a regular three-prong electric socket. And the company claims it will go from zero to 60 miles per hour in three seconds and hit a top speed of 200 miles per hour.

"It's the environmentalist mid-life crisis vehicle," says Richard Griffiths, head of business development at Hybrid. "It's a sports car that performs like a Porsche Boxster, looks like a Ferrari, and has zero emissions"

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The LiX will utilize lithium ion batteries, big versions of the kind that power laptop computers. Because they can store more energy and degrade less quickly when not in use than the nickel metal hydride batteries used in hybrid cars today, they're rapidly becoming the technology of choice for electric-car developers.

"Lithium chemistry is widely acknowledged to be the next generation of battery power," says Lindsay Brooke, senior editor of the Society of Automotive Engineer's magazine.

IFTF's Technology Horizons program is focusing its research this year on the theme of "lightweight infrastructure. These new infrastructure designs will emphasize smaller, smarter, more independent components that can be organized in ways that are more efficient, more flexible, and more secure than the capital-intensive networks of the 20th century.

While at first, the PAD concept may appear as the culmination of the ever-bigger trend in SUVs in America, we can also see it as a lightweight alternative to the traditional home or apartment. IFTF has noted the emergence of temporary cities like Burning Man as an important trend in our 2005 Map of the Decade, but if the concept embodied by PAD really caught on, we could see a whole new form of urbanism based on nomadism and reconfigurable cities. Lightweight infrastructure might allow us to rapidly prototype new forms of settlement as needs and constraints shift from day to day.

As part of a partnership with the TV show "The Apprentice," GM launched a contest last month to promote the Chevy Tahoe SUV. The contest challenges viewers to create their own digital commercial about the SUV at Chevyapprentice.com. Entrants must choose from a range of video clips and sound tracks and write their own text to create their ad.

Over the weekend, hundreds of people used the Internet to circulate thousands of videos that charged GM with contributing to global warming, protested the war in Iraq or just demeaned the Tahoe's quality. Some videos also contained profanity or sexually explicit messages.

Late Monday, GM announced that it would begin screening the ads for "offensive and inflammatory" content but would not remove material based solely on a "negative tone" toward the company.

The contest is a success as a marketing campaign, according to Melisa Tezanos, a GM spokeswoman. Consumers have submitted more than 21,000 ads and have e-mailed commercials over 40,000 times, she said. Chevyapprentice.com has generated 2.4 million page views, and the average visit to the site lasts more than 9 minutes. The company anticipated before launching the contest that it may see some negative ads, but Tezanos noted that more than 80 percent of the commercials depict the Tahoe in a favorable light.

Early on we made the decision that if we were to hold this contest, in which we invite anyone to create an ad, in an open forum, that we would be summarily destroyed in the blogosphere if we censored the ads based on their viewpoint. So, we adopted a position of openness and transparency, and decided that we would welcome the debate. (As an aside, we have been truly disappointed by the number of submissions we had to filter out because of their vulgar content.) I won't bore you with the details, but the overwhelming majority of the 22,000 submissions thus far have been earnest attempts at creating positive advertisements.