Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

Sunrise's Gintama: Shinyaku Benizakura-hen Special is bundled with the limited-edition home-video release of the earlier Benizakura-hen theatrical film, a bonus short tied to the same story.

SynergySP's Major: Message releases as a one-shot OVA epilogue to the Major baseball franchise, following pitcher-turned-fielder Goro Honda as he fights to return to professional baseball while rebuilding his relationship with his estranged daughter.

Shaft's Puella Magi Madoka Magica begins broadcast, a subversive magical-girl series following Madoka Kaname toward a fateful wish-granting contract with the cat-like Kyubey after she watches her classmate Homura Akemi fight a witch.

TMS Entertainment begins releasing Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas 2, the second OVA season continuing the prequel story of the Lost Canvas manga set generations before the original Saint Seiya.

Doraemon: Shin Nobita to Tetsujin Heidan - Habatake Tenshi-tachi, a remake of the franchise's own 1986 film, releases in Japanese theaters, sending Nobita and friends up against an invading Robot Army after Nobita builds a mysterious fallen robot of his own.

Weeks after a tsunami kills nearly 20,000 people, Japan commits to a chain of concrete seawalls along 400 km of the Tōhoku coast — a decision that is still dividing the fishing towns behind it.

Kyoto Animation releases a bonus K-ON!! episode bundled with the series' ninth Blu-ray/DVD volume, following the Light Music Club as they apply for passports ahead of a planned overseas trip.

Studio DEEN releases two bonus Sekaiichi Hatsukoi OVA episodes, filling in the backstory of editors Ritsu Onodera and Masamune Takano's high-school breakup and a later, awkward family visit for fellow couple Hatori and Chiaki.

An OVA adapting the climactic chapters of Kazuya Minekura's Saiyuki Gaiden manga, the prequel to her Saiyuki series set among the deities of Heaven before Son Goku's fall.

Dutch shipbuilder IHC Merwede delivered the Oleg Strashnov, a 183-metre DP3 crane vessel able to lift 5,000 tonnes, to Seaway Heavy Lifting on 1 April 2011. The ship went on to become one of the most powerful monohull crane vessels used in offshore construction.

Keppel Shipyard converted the VLCC Maersk Nova into the Maersk Peregrino FPSO, and the converted supertanker began pumping oil at the Peregrino field 85km off Rio de Janeiro in April 2011.

Sunrise's second Gintama TV season, Gintama', begins broadcast, picking up after a year-long time skip that scrambles the personalities of Edo's residents, including Yorozuya members Gintoki and Kagura.

White Fox's adaptation of the visual novel Steins;Gate begins airing, following self-proclaimed "mad scientist" Rintarou Okabe after his microwave-turned-time-machine starts sending text messages into the past.

A-1 Pictures' Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day begins airing, an original drama about a group of estranged childhood friends confronting their shared guilt over a tragic accident years earlier.

Blue Exorcist begins broadcast, an A-1 Pictures adaptation of Kazue Kato's manga about Rin Okumura, a teenager who discovers he is the son of Satan and enrolls at True Cross Academy to train as an exorcist rather than follow his demonic father.

Two unaired bonus episodes of the horror anime Shiki are bundled with the show's eighth and ninth home-video volumes, filling in scenes the TV broadcast skipped over in the outbreak overtaking the village of Sotoba.

Orbis International's DC-10-based Flying Eye Hospital flew to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for a three-week ophthalmic training program, its sixth mission in the country.

With Libyan production off the market, the International Energy Agency put 60 million barrels into it on 23 June 2011, and the US share came out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The auction was heavily oversubscribed: more than 90 offers came in for 30.2 million barrels of light sweet crude, and 15 companies took delivery.

Natsume's Book of Friends Season 3 begins broadcast, the third televised season of Brain's Base's adaptation of Yuki Midorikawa's supernatural slice-of-life manga.

John Deere introduced its restyled T-Series combine harvesters, including the giant T670, for the 2012 European harvest. The line is built at John Deere's Zweibrücken, Germany plant, the company's only site worldwide that also builds self-propelled forage harvesters.

Ferran Adrià closed the most influential restaurant of its era after 47 years above Cala Montjoi, relaunching it as a culinary research foundation. It held three Michelin stars and had been named the world's best five times.

Egyptian contractor Orascom finished cladding Pyongyang's pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel in glass in July 2011, ending a stop-start construction saga that began in 1987 — though the 330-metre tower has never opened to a single guest.

Gensou Mangekyou: The Memories of Phantasm, a fan-made original video anime based on the Touhou Project doujin game series, begins release.

Lerche releases Carnival Phantasm, a comedy OVA created for Type-Moon's tenth anniversary that parodies characters from Fate/stay night, Tsukihime, and Melty Blood in a shared, gag-filled continuity.

Sinovel completed installation of the SL5000, China's first independently developed 5-megawatt offshore wind turbine, as a single demonstration unit at the Donghai Bridge wind farm near Shanghai. Two of China's largest crane vessels assembled the 150-meter-tall machine through the region's typhoon season.

Brain's Base's Into the Forest of Fireflies' Light opens in Japanese theaters, a short supernatural romance following a girl named Hotaru and Gin, a forest spirit she can never touch, across their summers together.

Madhouse's second TV adaptation of Yoshihiro Togashi's Hunter x Hunter begins airing, restarting the manga from its beginning with young Gon Freecss setting out to become a Hunter like his father.

ufotable's Fate/Zero begins airing, a prequel to Fate/stay night depicting the brutal Fourth Holy Grail War fought a decade earlier by mercenary Kiritsugu Emiya and his Servant, Saber.

The Future Diary (Mirai Nikki) begins broadcast, Asread's adaptation of Sakae Esuno's manga about loner Yukiteru Amano, who discovers his imaginary friend Deus Ex Machina is real when he's forced into a deadly battle royale against eleven other holders of future-predicting phone diaries.

Boeing handed over the first 747-8 Freighter to launch customer Cargolux at its Everett, Washington widebody plant, putting the largest version of the 747 into commercial cargo service.

Bunny Drop Specials premieres, four short bonus episodes bundled across the Bunny Drop TV series home video release that expand on single guardian Daikichi and young Rin's daily life together.

Shaft airs Hidamari Sketch x SP, a two-part special bringing back Yuno, Sae, Hiro, and Miyako alongside new students Nori and Nazuna for more slice-of-life art-school antics.

K-ON!: The Movie releases in Japanese theaters, sending the Light Music Club's graduating members on one last overseas trip to London before they part ways.

The two-episode OVA Major: World Series begins release, animating the World Series arc of Takuya Mitsuda's baseball manga that the television series had skipped, and closing out the Major anime franchise.

The fourth TV season of Natsume's Book of Friends begins airing, following Takashi Natsume as he continues returning yokai names recorded in his grandmother's Book of Friends while confronting more of his own past.

TNK's High School DxD premieres, an ecchi fantasy following high schooler Issei Hyodo after he is killed on his first date and reincarnated as a low-ranking devil serving under his upperclassman Rias Gremory.

The horror-mystery TV anime Another begins broadcast, following transfer student Kouichi Sakakibara as he uncovers the deadly curse haunting Yomiyama North Middle School's Class 3.

Steins;Gate: Egoistic Poriomania, an OVA bundled with the TV series' final Blu-ray/DVD volume, releases, following the Future Gadget Lab members some months after the anime's ending as they plan a trip to America.

Brain's Base begins releasing a string of OVA episodes for History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi, bundled across several manga tankobon volumes and continuing the story of martial-arts trainee Kenichi Shirahama and the Ryozanpaku dojo.

Daily Lives of High School Boys Specials collects extra episodes of the deadpan high-school comedy that were left off the TV broadcast and released only on home video.

Xebec and AIC's Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 begins release, a remake OVA sending the battleship Yamato on a mission to save Earth from the invading Gamilas.

Fate/Zero Season 2 begins its TV run, closing out the Fourth Holy Grail War as its remaining Masters and Servants abandon their uneasy truce and fight to the finish.

Kyoto Animation's Hyouka begins broadcast, adapting Honobu Yonezawa's Classic Literature Club light novels as reluctant sleuth Houtarou Oreki is drawn into solving his high school club's small, long-buried mysteries.

Oscar-winning actress Sophia Loren christened the 139,000-tonne MSC Divina in Marseille a week after her delivery. Built for $550 million at STX France's Saint-Nazaire shipyard, she became the third ship in MSC Cruises' Fantasia class.

Tokyo Skytree, the world's tallest tower at the time and an earthquake-engineering showcase, opened to visitors in Sumida, Tokyo.

Liebherr presented its LTM 1750-9.1, an all-terrain mobile crane that can drive fully rigged on public roads with its 52-metre telescopic boom, to more than 2,000 customers at its Ehingen, Germany plant. The 750-tonne-capacity crane costs around 4 million euros.

Singapore's Gardens by the Bay opened on 29 June 2012, its Flower Dome conservatory later certified by Guinness World Records as the world's largest glass greenhouse.

At a seminar at CERN, the ATLAS and CMS experiments each report a new boson at around 125-126 GeV at five sigma, independently and from the same data-taking runs. It is the last unverified piece of the Standard Model.

A-1 Pictures' Sword Art Online begins broadcast, adapting Reki Kawahara's light novel series about players trapped inside a deadly virtual-reality MMORPG where death in the game means death in real life.

Wolf Children releases in Japanese theaters, Mamoru Hosoda's original film about a young mother raising two half-wolf children alone after their werewolf father's early death, animated by Madhouse alongside Hosoda's own Studio Chizu.