Alaska

Coordinates: 64°N 150°W / 64°N 150°W / 64; -150

Alaska (ⁱ/əˈlæskÉ™/) is a U.S. state situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent. Bordering the state to the east are the Canadian territory of Yukon and the Canadian province of British Columbia; to the north are the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, southern parts of the Arctic Ocean. To the west and south is the Pacific Ocean, with Russia (specifically, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and Kamchatka Krai) farther west across the Bering Strait. Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area, the 3rd least populous and the least densely populated of the 50 United States. Approximately half of Alaska's residents (estimated at 738,432 by the Census Bureau in 2015) live within the Anchorage metropolitan area. Alaska's economy is dominated by the oil, natural gas, and fishing industries, resources which it has in abundance. Tourism and military bases are also a significant part of the economy.

Although it had been occupied for over ten thousand years by indigenous peoples, from the 18th century onward, European powers considered the territory of Alaska ripe for exploitation and trade. The United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire on March 30, 1867, for 7.2 million U.S. dollars at approximately two cents per acre ($4.74/km²). The area went through several administrative changes before becoming organized as a territory on May 11, 1912. It was admitted as the 49th state of the U.S. on January 3, 1959.

Keish

Keish (1859 or 1860– July 11, 1916), legally James Mason, best known by his nickname Skookum Jim Mason, was a Canadian native and a member of the Tagish First Nation in what became the Yukon Territory of Canada. He was born close to Bennett Lake on what is now the British Columbia/Yukon border, to a Tahltan woman (which under the conventions of a matrilineal society made him Tahltan.) He lived in Carcross, Yukon, Canada.

In the mid-1880s, he worked as a packer over the Chilkoot Pass carrying supplies for miners, where he earned his Skookum nickname because of his extraordinary strength. Skookum means "strong", "big" and "reliable" in the Chinook Jargon and regional English as used in the Pacific Northwest.

He assisted William Ogilvie in his explorations of the upper Yukon. He also showed members of the expedition the way over the White Pass. Keish is today co-credited with making the gold discovery at Discovery Claim that led to the Klondike Gold Rush, although it was originally attributed solely to George Carmack, his brother-in-law. It is also possible that the discovery was made by Keish's sister Shaaw Tláa (Kate Carmack).

Pokémon GO

Pokémon GO is an upcoming augmented reality game for mobile phones developed by Niantic, scheduled to be released in 2016 for iOS and Android devices. The game will be released alongside the Pokémon Go Plus, a small wearable device developed by Nintendo, which uses a Bluetooth connection to notify users when a Pokémon is nearby with a LED and a light rumble. The game will allow players to capture, battle, train and trade virtual Pokémon who appear throughout the real world. The game will be free-to-play, although it will support in-app purchases.

The idea for the game was conceived in 2013 by Satoru Iwata of Nintendo and Tsunekazu Ishihara of The Pokémon Company. In 2015, Ishihara dedicated his speech at the game's announcement on September 10 to Iwata, who died two months earlier. Ishihara and his wife had played Ingress. Different Pokémon will live in different areas of the world - for example, water type Pokémon will live near water. There will be events held where players can trade Pokémon to build up their collection. A wristband device called the "Pokémon Go Plus" will ship with the game, to allow a more "heads-up" gaming experience than Ingress, where the player can be alerted to a nearby Pokémon by the Go Plus vibrating, press the button in a coded sequence to capture it and check the app later to find out what they've captured. The decision to create the Go Plus rather than create a smart watch app was to increase uptake among players for whom a smart watch is prohibitively expensive.

Yukon River

The Yukon River is a major watercourse of northwestern North America. The source of the river is located in British Columbia, Canada. The next portion lies in, and gives its name to, Yukon. The lower half of the river lies in the U.S. state of Alaska. The river is 3,190 kilometres (1,980 mi) long and empties into the Bering Sea at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The average flow is 6,430 m³/s (227,000 ft³/s). The total drainage area is 832,700 km² (321,500 mi²), of which 323,800 km² (126,300 mi²) is in Canada. By comparison, the total area is more than 25% larger than Texas or Alberta.

The longest river in Alaska and Yukon, it was one of the principal means of transportation during the 1896–1903 Klondike Gold Rush. A portion of the river in Yukon—"The Thirty Mile" section, from Lake Laberge to the Teslin River—is a national heritage river and a unit of Klondike Gold Rush International Historical Park. Paddle-wheel riverboats continued to ply the river until the 1950s, when the Klondike Highway was completed. After the purchase of Alaska by the United States in 1867, the Alaska Commercial Company acquired the assets of the Russian-American Company and constructed several posts at various locations on the Yukon River.