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Japanese arcade game driving beetle extinction
"Gotta catch 'em all" has taken on a new meaning with a recent Japanese video game craze helping to drive the real-life extinction to the a subspecies of Turkish beetle. The Times Online reports that the popularity of bug-collecting arcade game Mushiking (King of the Beetles) is leading Japanese fans to import a million of the insects as pets each year, decimating the indigenous population."All we want to do is end the trade in our stag beetles," said Nazim Sonmez, chairman of the Amanos Environmental Protection Association. "They are being collected for economic reasons rather than research purposes. The stag beetle is under threat of extinction. It must be stopped."Bug collecting is a long-standing tradition in Japan that has appeared in games from The Legend of Zelda to Animal Crossing, but Mushiking has raised the activity to a national craze to rival Pokemon. The Sega arcade unit engages players in a rock-paper-scissors style battle of digital insects printed on collectible cards, more than 160 million of which have been printed to date.
Giant Panda robots: extinction solved
Ahh Giant Pandas... cute and cuddly until they rip out your jugular with a swipe from those massive thumbed paws. What better avatar to lull us into complacency while cleansing the fields of our human scourge? Ok, ok, only the head can actually be considered robotic with 14 servo motors used to create realistic panda expressions like confusion: "has anyone seen my bamboo?" or anger: "I am not a teddy bear!" The rest is just some guy in a fancy monkey suit drunk on Billy Beer. Now isn't it about time we forget about all this endangered species crap since man clearly possesses the power to preserve these giant bears raccoons automatons forever in some kind of It's a Small World freak show? Just click the read link if you don't concur, go ahead, click.
