Plus: Autonomous Robot Athletes, Long-flying Paper Planes, a Veggie Race Car and the Best NASA Photos from the Last 50 Years.

Taking a page from Captain James T. Kirk’s leadership log, editors at Lifewise wrote a management guide inspired by how Star Trek‘s Capt. Kirk ran his ship. Here are some lessons from the helm of the Starship Enterprise to consider for the office:

Manage Up
Capt. Kirk’s dilemma: A superior officer who earlier lost his ship seizes command of the Enterprise from Kirk and is about to make the same mistake.

Workplace dilemma: Your boss orders you to do something you know will be bad for your company, but not obeying may cost you your job.

Solution: Kirk used insubordination and Spock to get his ship back. You may not have Vulcan mind-control powers at your disposal, so instead, learn to (diplomatically) manage your boss.

Be Aware of the Whole Picture
Capt. Kirk’s dilemma: A subterranean creature is killing workers on a mining planet and the miners want it dead.

Workplace dilemma: You’re getting different information about the same incident from multiple people.

Solution: Kirk investigated and discovered that the creature is protecting her eggs, which the miners have been destroying. Similarly, find out the whole story. Create an environment where people can talk openly with you.

For other management tips from Captain Kirk, click HERE. For real-world counterparts of the iconic franchise’s high-tech devices, click HERE.

Race Car Made of Veggies
A team from the University of Warwick’s (U.K.) Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (WIMRC) constructed the first Formula 3 race car built entirely of sustainable parts. The steering wheel is made of carrots, the break pads of cashew nuts and some parts of the frame were made with potatoes and others from recycled plastic bottles.

“This is at a time when the motor industry has to become more environmentally friendly and sustainable while avoiding any compromises in performance,” WIMRC said on its Web site. “Having anticipated this scenario, WIMRC conceived a project intended to prove to the industry that it is possible to build a competitive racing car using environmentally sustainable components through the use of the latest research outputs.”

The team took the ecoF3 car through its first run on Saturday, when it reached a top speed of 118 mph. The car is currently ineligible to compete in next season’s F3 championship because the engine’s biofuel does not meet regulations; the car runs on a mixture of chocolate and vegetable oils.

Engineering Super Paper Planes
More than 250 contestants from 83 countries took part in the Red Bull 2009 Worldwide Paper Plane Contest, held in Salzburg, Austria, May 2, using only a standard A4 sheet of paper and arm strength to launch their planes. While some paper planes had noses that were too dense and others with tails too long, a few were engineered to fly longer than 10 seconds.

Brazil’s Leonard Ang constructed a paper plane that stayed up 11.66 seconds to nab the longest airtime title. Japan’s Takeshige Kishlura Kisshii took first place in the aerobatics category and two-time winner Jovica Kozlica (Croatia) defended his long-distance title from 2006 by managing to fly his plane 54.5 meters during this year’s contest.

The path to the paper plane finals saw more than 37,000 competitors in 613 qualifying tournaments worldwide.

2009 RoboCup U.S. Open
The ultimate goal of RoboCup, an “international joint project to promote [artificial intelligence], robotics and related fields,” is to be able to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots to take on a world-class human soccer team by 2050. The people who design the robots must incorporate various technologies, such as “design principles of autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics and sensor-fusion,” to get the robots to play soccer, the organization said on its Web site.

This year’s RoboCup finals will be held in Graz, Austria, June 29 to July 5. The U.S. finals were held earlier this month at Bowdoin College. The final teams were made by students from the University of Texas at Austin, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University and Bowdoin College, who took first, second, third and fourth place, respectively. The robots played 20-minute matches on a 4.4-x-6.8-meter field, as seen below.

Best NASA Photos from Last Half-Century
Discover Magazine compiled its choices for the best NASA photos from the last 50 years. The image below is of a massive solar flare from the sun’s AR9077 region that blasted an enormous cloud of positive-charged particles, triggering magnetic storms and auroral displays in July 2000. This image was captured by the orbiting Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) satellite.

Image credit: TRACE

For the rest of the “best” images, click HERE.
Toodles!