“When you complete a route, your team cheers you on, and if you don’t succeed, they give you feedback. Bouldering with a group gives me an extra boost of energy and inspires me to work harder,” 22-year-old Cho, who currently has a climbing crew of 99 members, explained. Lone climbers can easily join a club through interest-based community platforms such as Munto and Somoim. These apps let users ...

A court in Daegu has sentenced a 49-year old man to three years in prison on charges of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter, Friday. The man claimed that he had confused the stepdaughter for his wife. The incident took place in July last year, when the victim, a student in her twenties, had come home from college overseas for the summer to help her mother and stepfather run their restaurant. ...

Nearly 60 percent of Korean nationals in their twenties skip breakfast, while 34 percent of the entire population skip the first meal of the day, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency. The group with the highest portion of people who did not eat breakfast was women in their twenties at 63.3 percent. However, when comparing men and women across all age groups, slightly more...

A 5-meter-tall, bloodthirsty, gelatinous cube is slowly edging nearer and attempting to engulf you whole -- what do you do? Such a strange scenario might be familiar to those engaging in tabletop role-playing games, or TRPGs. As the name suggests, TRPGs are usually played around a table in a small group. In contrast to other board games, role-playing games can be played with a set of peculiar d...

Whether you have a pessimistic or optimistic attitude in life might affect your risk of dementia, new research shows. In a study published by the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, researchers at the University of California, Davis investigated the link between personality traits and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s diagnoses based on 44,531 participants. Results of the study suggest that spe...

More than half of Korean company employees report for office duty on less than seven hours of sleep, a recent report showed. According to a survey conducted on 880 participants by the online job portal Incruit, 56.3 percent of office workers get only four to six hours of slumber daily. In second place, 41.6 percent of participants listed an average of seven to nine hours. The Korean Society of ...

Chanel Korea has been ordered to pay a fine of 3.6 million won ($2,750) for demanding excessive personal data of its customers. The French luxury fashion house was reported to have denied visitors entry to the store unless they provided their phone number, date of birth date and place of residence. The Personal Information Protection Commission deemed the actions to be in violation of the Person...

Hidden stories iGoBart drew inspiration for his "Welcome To My Dong" project from a visit to a small market in Gajwa-dong. There, he and his wife discovered an unexpected aspect of the neighborhood: a street lined with adult bars euphemistically referred to as "teahouses." He then realized that, despite having explored many locations in Korea, he remained unaware of numerous hidden places and un...

Samsung Medical Center has carried out the first successful uterus transplantation in South Korea. During the surgery in January this year, the multidisciplinary team were able to transfer the uterus to a 35-year-old woman with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser Syndrome. MRKH is a rare disorder, which affects about 1 in 5,000 females at birth, characterized by an underdeveloped or absent uterus. A...

The Busan District Court on Friday has sentenced a woman in her 20s who left her dead newborn in a shopping mall restroom in October of last year to six years in prison. The mother is accused of giving birth in the bathroom of her home on Oct. 4 last year and not making any attempts to save the baby from falling into the toilet water, with the newborn suffocating as a consequence. Prosecutors be...

As the wind gets chillier and coats get thicker, the smell of baked “bungeoppang” -- a fish-shaped pastry -- filling the streets is a warm welcome for many South Koreans. However, the price of this popular winter snack has been rising steadily over the years, as the cost of its ingredients grow. While three pieces of bungeoppang could be enjoyed for 1,000 won in 2021, this year the price has do...

The police have taken custody of a man who killed one person and injured another in a knife attack Wednesday. According to the police station in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, the suspect, a man in his 50s, confessed that he attacked the victims when they reprimanded him for not repaying his debts and told him to “stop borrowing money from people around him”. The initial altercation took place at a ...

From performing at Yonsei University’s Akaraka festival and teaching English on Jeju Island, to making content as a full-time creator, TikTok influencer Max Not Beer has been enjoying a variety of experiences in South Korea. Max -- whose real name is Max Abrams -- moved to Korea last February from the US to pursue his career as a full-time content creator, having garnered a significant following...

It never rains but it pours. Every day this summer we are bombarded by bad news -- raging forest fires, the continuing Ukraine war, random shootings in different cities, a mutating omicron, monkeypox and rising debt distress all over. The good news for some is that the United States dollar is stronger than ever. Or is that bad news for others? In the Bali G-20 Financial Ministers and Central Ban...

Income and wealth inequality is unjust, and yet the world continues to tolerate rising injustices, the most recent being inequalities in vaccine distribution. French political economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues at the World Inequality Lab have just published the World Inequality Report 2022, a real goldmine in data and insights on global inequalities. I found at least three nuggets insi...