Plus: Strange Behavior in Work Elevators and What It Feels Like to Land on Mars.

Weird Behavior in Work Elevators

Strange things are afoot in work elevators, according to recent CareerBuilder.com findings.

Based on a survey of more than 3,800 workers nationwide, the job-search firm has uncovered some of the stranger and more annoying behaviors witnessed by workers in their office elevators.

Although most people apparently follow standard elevator etiquette, a number of professionals cited some unexpected this-really-happened experiences while in transit, including the following behaviors:

• Changing a baby’s diaper;
• Clipping fingernails;
• Showing someone a rash and asking for a diagnosis;
• Dancing throughout the ride;
• Moving the entire contents of a co-worker’s office – including the desk – into the elevator; and
• A woman with her arms full using her head to keep the doors from closing on her.

When asked to identify the most irritating elevator habits they commonly see at the office, workers generally cited standard annoyances:

• Talking on a cell phone (35 percent);
• Not holding the door open when others are running to get on (33 percent);
• Standing too close when there is plenty of room in the elevator (32 percent);
• Squeezing in when it’s already too crowded (32 percent);
• Not stepping off the elevator to let others out (27 percent);
• Holding the elevator doors open for an extended period of time while waiting for someone else to get on (26 percent);
• Cutting in line to get on the elevator when other people have been waiting longer (23 percent); and
• Taking the elevator to go up one or two floors instead of using the stairs (20 percent).

Our efforts to make the elevator ride a more pleasant experience for everyone continue.

What It Feels Like to Land on Mars

Earlier this month, NASA’s rover Curiosity – by far the largest and most ambitious technological system sent to Mars – touched down on the surface of the Red Planet.

The video below is not a simulation. It is a full-resolution version of the NASA Curiosity rover’s descent – a rover’s-eye-view of the Red Planet’s surface zooming up to meet it – based on the landing photographs taken by the on-board Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) seamlessly stitched together.

Curiosity has completed less than three weeks of testing on the planet, but in the past week alone it has “interrogated” a Martian rock with a laser, wiggled its wheels and, proving the rover can rove, passed its first driving test.

For at least two Earth years – about one Martian year – the rover will explore the landscape to determine whether Mars was once or is now potentially habitable.

How Far Along Star Trek Tech Has Come

Futuristic technologies don’t always look the way the 1960s might have portrayed them. But sometimes they do.

When Star Trek first debuted on television, it exposed people around the world to a bright future full of high-tech gadgets, inspiring scientists, engineers and inventors to come. From smartphones and tablet computers to big-screen TVs and 3-D printers, our daily lives are filled with devices that would have been considered science-fiction just a few decades ago.

The following infographic, put together by Sortable.com, illustrates some of the coolest tech devices imagined in the series and how far science has come toward making them a reality. (For another, more recent infographic on the science behind Star Trek, check out BitRebels.com.)

Click image for full-size view. Credit: Sortable.com

Cheers.