The famous fashion retailer is now pulling out of the Japanese market, saying it will close down all 14 stores in the country by the end of October. The Mainichi reports that the company decided to withdraw from the market because of the low sales. In addition, the Los Angeles-based company is preparing for a potential bankruptcy filing. 

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The Dutch police arrested a man and his pet bird for shoplifting. The bird, who was on his owner's shoulder during the arrest, was placed in a jail cell with bread and water. Interestingly enough, when the media reported the arrest, they placed a little black bar over the bird’s face to protect its identity! Maybe the media thought  they’ll be swarmed with protests from the bird’s friends if they didn’t protect the bird’s identity. 

(via CampbellxEmma on Twitter)



image credit: via CampbellxEmma on Twitter

Minecraft lovers, get your cash ready as a new Minecraft-based board game is now ready for purchase! The board game is called Minecraft: Builders & Biomes, where players can explore the Overworld, build structures, and mine resources. The game is designed for two to four players, and according to IGN, take 30-60 minutes to play. Well, that beats the number of hours some spend building a city in the original game! 

image credit: via Amazon

Rainbow-colored designs span bridges, corridors, and large-scale sculptures in Elsa Tomkowiak’s new work, exhibited as a part of the second edition of Annecy Paysages in southeastern France. Her rainbow art interventions scale from covering up outdoor bridges to six 15-foot spheres along lake Annecy. There’s always more room for creative art exhibitions, afterall! 

(via Colossal)

image credit: via Colossal

Most barber shops have the iconic and well-remembered rotating red, white, and blue poles outside. The reality and origin behind those tricolored poles are redder than the red on the poles. Barbers, in medieval times, did more than just cutting hair. They were known as barber-surgeons, where besides hair-cutting, they also performed minor surgery, pulled teeth, and amputated limbs. 

But it’s not the minor surgeries they performed that made the barber poles of today blue, red, and white, it’s the bloodletting that made these poles like that. Barbers performed bloodletting when Pope Alexander II ordered monks and priests to stop performing the service, as Reader’s Digest detailed: 

At the time, people thought having too much blood in a certain area could cause diseases like fevers or the plague, and letting some out would make them healthy. During the treatment, barber-surgeons would give patients poles to hold, the original barber poles. Grasping the staff made their veins pop out a bit, making them easier to find while the barbers went all Sweeney Todd.

Even back then, people knew there was a limit to bloodletting, so barbers would stop the bleeding with a white cloth. They’d then tie those towels to the poles and hang them outside their shops, according to History. Some towels stayed blood-stained even after they were washed, so it was common to see a pole with white and red swirling around in the breeze.

These days, barbers leave the medical treatment to doctors, but their poles are a nod to their bloody past. 

image credit: via wikimedia commons

For $100,000 you can spend a night inside an igloo at the North Pole! Great deal, right? North Pole Igloos hotel, a temporary hotel sight that will open on April 2020, will be made up of 10 heated domes where the guests can sleep in the center of the Arctic Ocean for one month. For people to survive the journey to the North Pole, they need to rough it in tents and bring all the equipment to be safe in the cold, frozen environment. However, North Pole Igloos hotel will provide its guests with all the necessities: heated igloo with en suite toilet, on-site camp manager, Arctic wilderness guide, chef and security team. 

If you can spare $100,000 by the time the hotel will open up for business, then maybe you can experience fine hotel at the North Pole!

(via CNN)

image credit: Luxury Action via CNN

Entombed is an Atari 2600 game, where the player and their team of archaeologists get stuck into a ‘catacombs of zombies’. The game, among many other old releases, are explored by ‘video game archaeologists’ to learn how the early days of video gaming came about, and to find secrets that can help modern programming problems of today. In trying to unearth how this video game was created, video game archaeologists John Aycock and Tara Copplestone stumbled upon a bigger mystery than they expected. 

Entombed’s main gameplay mechanisms are the catacombs, a down-ward scrolling and two dimensional maze that players have to navigate to escape zombies. The game generates the maze design randomly and on the fly,   where players never traversed the same maze twice. This is where the mystery lies, on how the game decided its maze designs, as BBC detailed:

It turned out that the maze is generated in a sequence. The game needs to decide, as it draws each new square of the maze, whether it should draw a wall or a space for the game characters to move around in. Each square should therefore be “wall” or “no wall” – “1” or “0” in computer bits. The game’s algorithm decides this automatically by analysing a section of the maze. It uses a five-square tile that looks a little like a Tetris piece. This tile determines the nature of the next square in each row.

How? That’s the fascinating part. The fundamental logic that determines the next square is locked in a table of possible values written into the game’s code. Depending on the values of the five-square tile, the table tells the game to deposit either wall, no wall or a random choice between the two.

Aycock and Copplestone have tried retro-engineering the table. They looked for patterns in the values to try and reveal how it was designed, but this was to no avail. Whatever the programmer did, it was a stroke of mild genius.  During their research, Aycock and Copplestone were able to interview one of the people involved in the game’s production, Steve Sidley.

He too remembered being confused by the table at the time. “I couldn’t unscramble it,” he told the researchers. And he claimed it had been the work of a programmer who developed it while not entirely sober: “He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain.” Aycock tried to contact the programmer in question but got no response.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

The SeaBubble is a potentially new form of electric transportation, and the newest hope to beating the Parisian traffic. Known as a “flying taxi”, the SeaBubble resembles a vehicle straight out of a science fiction film, being oblong, glassy, and having the ability to glide across water without making a sound. This wonder vehicle can reach 20 miles per hour, as The Washington Post details: 

Known as a “flying taxi,” the boat can reach 20 miles per hour as it rises nearly 30 inches above the water using wing-like structures known as “hydrofoils” that are designed to reduce drag. Inside, the vehicle holds up to four passengers, who face one another as if riding in a London taxi, according to Le Parisien, whose reporter snagged a ride inside the futuristic vehicle.

Designers say the taxi — which has been tested up and down the river Seine in the heart of Paris — can be hailed using a smartphone app and could be available for rides as early as next year, pending final licensing.

image credit: Francois Mori/AP via The Washington Post

The famed caped hero now joins forces with Fortnite! The rumoured crossover was announced by Epic Games, as the Dark Knight reached its 80th anniversary. The Fortnite/Batman crossover will start on TKTKTKTKTK, as IGN detailed: 

The Fortnite/Batman crossover will feature a variety of new skins, items, and other challenges for players to acquire. Previously leaked items included:

+ Multiple Batman-themed skins.

+ Batman-themed gliders.

+ An explosive batarang that homes in on enemy players, sticks to walls, and explodes if enemies get too close.

+ A“Grapnel” gun, which works a lot like Fortnite’s old grappling gun, but now players get a cape when they’re flying around.

image credit: via IGN

The room is aptly called the “Room of Horrors” where guests can adjust the dial on the room’s wall, which in turn adjusts the level of uncanny occurrences in the room. The room of horrors is one of the many odd rooms that Mysterious Lodging offers, with a total of 11 themed rooms, each costing 7,500 yen (US$70) per night. Mysterious Lodging has a game themed room, a room where you can rock climb (Room of Regeneration), and a room where you can commune with a famous samurai, to name a few. If you’d like to spice up your vacation in Japan, why not give the lodging a try! 

(via SoraNews24)

image credit: via SoraNews24

Considered as one of the most impressive cave temples in India, Kailasa temple is a megalith that was formed from a single block of excavated stone. Located in Maharashtra, Kailasa temple is one of the 34 cave temples known collectively as the Ellora Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Though the person who had Kailasa temple built remains unknown, My Modern Met gives details on the structure’s architecture retained over the passage of time: 

Kailasa was built from the top. This unusual decision called for 200,000 tons of volcanic rock to be excavated from the rock. Standing at about three stories tall, a horseshoe-shaped courtyard has a gopuram—tower—at its entrance. Given the vast space and the ornate decorations of the temple, it’s believed that the work may have started with Krishna I, but could have carried on for centuries, with different rulers adding their own flair.

Enormous stone carvings depict different Hindu deities with particular attention to Shiva. As one walks past the gopuram, panels on the left have followers of Shiva, while panels on the left show devotees of Vishnu.  At the base of the temple, a herd of carved elements appears to carry the load of the temple on their backs. It’s thanks to these masterful sculptures, as well as the incredible engineering of the temple, that Kailasa is considered an outstanding example of Indian art and architecture.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

The glaciers are melting, the Arctic’s Ice cap is slowly getting thinner, wildfire seasons in other countries are getting longer, and more natural forest fires occur. These events are getting the attention of everyone, and concern is on the rise. In order to understand the reason behind these natural phenomenons, the terms “climate change” and “global warming” come up as the explanation. Mark Mancini details on the difference between the two terms, which are frequently treated as synonyms, when they’re not: 

So what exactly does the term "climate change" mean? By the broadest definition, climate change includes any and all long-term fluctuations in one or more climate-related variables — such as average rainfall — within the same location.

Note that this applies to both regional climates and the global climate itself. So let's say northern Europe saw a dramatic spike in rainstorms and the trend continued for decades on end. That hypothetical scenario would count as an example of regional climate change, no matter what happened elsewhere in the world.

On the other hand, global warming is — well, global. More to the point, the term refers to an increase in a planet's average surface temperature. And here on Earth, that's definitely been climbing.

(via ecowatch.com)

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Merriam-Webster added 530 new words to the dictionary, including an additional definition of “they”, and we couldn’t be happier for our nonbinary folks! The added definition of “they” was to include the use of the word as a nonbinary pronoun. According to Merriam-Webster, “they” is "used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary," or a person who doesn't identify as a man or a woman.

The next time some ignorant, awful person, chose to disrespect someone’s pronouns because it’s not valid, they can use Merriam-Webster’s official addition to counter. Not that they need to do that, when respect should be for anyone, regardless of gender. 

(via Popsugar)

image credit: via Popsugar

Marathons are a difficult feat to finish under normal circumstances, imagine joining and completing a marathon with a tree strapped on your back! A group of runners who ran the Cape Town marathon in South Africa managed to complete the event with saplings strapped to their backs. 

The reason for such a gimmick was to promote the planting of native trees. According to one of the members of the group, Siyabulela Sokomani (who had a wild olive on his back during the run), the group is raising cash to plant 2,000 trees in Khayelitsha. 

(via Reuters)

image credit: Mike Hutchings via Reuters

An experimental device is helping a handful of volunteers see. The device, called Orion, captures images and transforms them into dots of light the patients can see. Patients can see images in various shapes: a circle, oval, or a moving line, according to Dr. Nader Pouratian, the lead researcher for the Orion. CBS News has more details: 

Here's how it works. Using a camera attached to a pair of sunglasses, Orion captures images a person would see and then sends the data through a handheld device to an implant that's been surgically inserted into the visual part of the brain. The implant then turns those images into dots of light the patient can see.

image credit: via wikimedia commons