Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

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.

Life goes on at the Wagnaria family restaurant as its peculiar employees try to provide a good service despite their individual eccentricities.

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.

When low-born servant boys Piao and Xin set out to become the world’s greatest war generals, they quickly find themselves caught up in a violent struggle between two noblemen plotting to overthrow the King.

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.

The girls of the Amusement Club return in Yuru Yuri♪♪, finding new ways to make passing time even more enjoyable.

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.

The five members of the Cultural Research Club - Taichi Yaegashi, Iori Nagase, Himeko Inaba, Yui Kiriyama, and Yoshifumi Aoki - encounter a bizarre phenomenon one day when Aoki and Yui switch bodies without warning.

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.

Sany opened its $818 million Lingang facility near Shanghai, calling it the world's largest excavator factory. Automated underground tunnels move structures and components through 5.9 million square feet of production space.

Toei Animation airs One Piece: Episode of Nami - Koukaishi no Namida to Nakama no Kizuna, a newly animated television special retelling the Arlong Park arc and Nami’s backstory.

Sunrise's Gintama: Yorinuki Gintama-san on Theater 2D plays in select Japanese theaters, recutting the Shinsengumi Crisis and Kabukicho Four Devas TV arcs into a two-part movie presentation.

ADAC Luftrettung signs a framework order for 14 EC145 T2 (later renamed H145) and 3 EC135 P2e helicopters, built at what is now Airbus Helicopters' Donauwörth plant, the model whose build process this film documents.

Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton submit a deep convolutional network to the ImageNet challenge as team SuperVision and win by a wide margin. The result turns GPU deep learning from a niche into an industry.

Gintama': Enchousen begins airing, a 13-episode continuation of Sunrise's samurai-comedy anime adapting Hideaki Sorachi's manga, following the Yorozuya through the "Kintoki impostor" and Yoshiwara arcs.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure begins broadcast, David Production's adaptation of Hirohiko Araki's long-running manga, opening with Phantom Blood's rivalry between young aristocrat Jonathan Joestar and his adoptive brother Dio Brando over a cursed stone mask.

The first Puella Magi Madoka Magica compilation film, Beginnings, opens in Japanese theaters, condensing the early episodes of the TV series with new footage as the tetralogy of films begins.

You may have heard of kung fu, but the girls at Oarai High School practice gun-fu—really, really BIG 75mm gun-fu, in fact. It's called Sensha-do, and it's the martial art of operating armored tanks!

Production I.G's Psycho-Pass begins airing, a cyberpunk thriller set in a future Japan where the Sibyl System judges citizens' criminal potential before any crime occurs.

Shaft's Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part 2: Eternal opens in Japanese theaters, recapping the back half of the TV series as Homura Akemi and the other magical girls confront the truth behind their contracts and the witch Walpurgisnacht.

Kokoro Connect: Michi Random premieres, a set of OVA episodes bundled with the Kokoro Connect light novels that catch up with Taichi, Iori, Himeko, Yoshifumi, and Yui as a new "emotion sickness" ability strikes the group.

DCNS handed over the Aquitaine, the lead ship of France's FREMM-class multi-mission frigates, to the French Navy. The 142-meter, 6,000-tonne frigate was built at DCNS's Lorient shipyard.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a 2012 epic fantasy film directed by Peter Jackson from a screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Jackson, and Guillermo del Toro. It is based on the 1937 novel The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. The film is the first installment in The Hobbit trilogy, acting as a prequel to Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003).

The $16BN Makkah Royal Clock Tower, holding the world's largest clock face and the highest occupied space on Earth at the time, was completed overlooking Islam's holiest site.

Nekomonogatari: Kuro premieres as the sixth and final part of the original Monogatari Series broadcast, adapting NisiOisin's Nekomonogatari Black light novel as Koyomi Araragi investigates why Tsubasa Hanekawa is hiding behind a bandage.