One Airline's Extreme Attempt to Go Green
Attempting to reduce environmental impact has become a popular trend among corporations, but one company has taken an unusual route to cut down its carbon footprint. As one of several conservation measures, Japanese airline All Nippon Airways (ANA) recently announced it will be asking passengers on some of its flights to use a bathroom before boarding rather than relieving themselves on the plane, Agence France-Presse reports.

According to the Daily Mail, ANA "claims that empty bladders mean lighter passengers, a lighter aircraft and thus lower fuel use." The airline estimates that if half its passengers handled their restroom needs before boarding, it could lower carbon dioxide emissions by 4.2 tons per month due to reduced fuel consumption from carrying less weight, Seattle Post-Intelligencer's AirlineReporter blog says. Airline staff will be present at boarding gates to ask passengers to use a bathroom before embarking.

ANA also plans to recycle paper cups and plastics bottles, as well as provide environmentally friendly chopsticks.

Unusual Real-Life Excuses for Missing Work
Everyone misses a day of work or comes in late from time to time, but the excuses people provide to explain their absence can range from the reasonable to the outright ridiculous.

According to CareerBuilder.com's latest annual absenteeism survey, 32 percent of employees called in sick at least once this year when they were actually well, while 29 percent of employers reported checking on their workers' excuses and 15 percent said they fired an employee for using a bogus excuse.

Here are some selections from CareerBuilder's new list of the most unusual excuses employees provided for missing work:

• I got sunburned at a nude beach and can't wear clothes;
• My buddies locked me in the trunk of an abandoned car after a weekend of drinking;

• A bee flew in my mouth;
• I have a headache from eating hot peppers;
• I accidentally hit a nun with my motorcycle;
• I was injured chasing a seagull; and
• I'm just not into it today.

Coming up with an outlandish excuse is probably unnecessary, as most companies are willing to be flexible with their employees when they need a break. As Rosemary Hefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder explained, "Sixty-three percent of companies we surveyed said they let their team members use sick days for mental health days. If you need time to recharge, your best bet is to be honest with your manager."

A Half-Century of Space Exploration
Space flight is a monumental achievement that speaks to the innovation and resourcefulness of humanity in its pursuit of the unknown. In a recent compilation of all the space exploration missions from the past 50 years on a single map, National Geographic shows us just how far we've come in charting the regions beyond Earth.

The graphic includes missions conducted by the United States and other countries, both successful and unsuccessful, throughout the solar system. Each line represents a single mission, and there are highlights of notable missions that have changed the history of space exploration.

Click image for huge view.
Image: Flickr/Adam Crowe

Source(s): Stevey.com via digg.com

Large Hadron Collider Sabotaged from the Future?
Remember the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle collider — also the biggest, most expensive scientific instrument in history — and how barely a week after it was activated, it had to be shut down due to an electrical malfunction? Although it has taken more than a year to bring it back on line, some (actual) scientists are claiming that problems with the LHC may be caused by time-traveling sabotage.

According to the New York Times on Monday, a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists" suggest that the theoretical Higgs boson the LHC is intended to produce may be so "abhorrent to nature" that it caused a ripple to travel backward through time to stop its own creation.

This mind-bending act of prevention would be "like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather," the Times reports. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, and Masao Ninomiya, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Japan, in a recent paper proposed a "card game" type of experiment to help differentiate between bad luck and signs of intentional collider sabotage. For example, pulling a card that recommends shutting down the collider from a stack of 100 million recommending that it stays operational would be a sign of interference in the project's success.

The Shape-Shifting Robot Blob
A blob is an unusual and sometimes terrifying shape that is notably difficult to replicate through mechanical means, but researchers from iRobot and the University of Chicago recently unveiled a soft, shape-shifting mobile robot designed through a contract with the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The palm-sized robot, also known as a ChemBot, makes use of "jamming" technology that enables material to switch between solid and semi-liquid states through a relatively modest change in volume, CNET News reports. When air is pulled from internal pockets, the robot's flexible silicone skin equalizes the pressure by shifting tightly packed particles inside, causing the robot to inflate and deflate parts of its body. The device is intended for traversing difficult terrain and squeezing through small openings.

Here's a demonstration of the rolling, almost life-like robot blob in action:

Things get crazy around the 1:50 mark.

Have a great weekend, folks.