Star Place is a new Taiwanese department store designed by Dutch architects UNStudio. Outside, the building is beautiful, with a curved façade that glows in a weird star-like moiré pattern. However, the best part of this structure is inside, in its 10-storey atrium, where the designers have constructed a spiral stair made by rotating escalators over a central axis.

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Beware the next time your ride an escalator at the mall folks. It appears that they are beginning to stage an organised revolt against their passengers. First an escalator chewed up this poor bastard, then one dished out some payback after some tool disrespected it with a joyride. But that was just a warm up because the escalators appear to be getting bolder. Most recently, a rogue escalator took out 20 passengers in a Tokyo convention centre when it inexplicably started going in reverse.

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It was bound to happen: moron A tries to emulate the blonde girl's magical spinning--flat on an escalator's handrails--while moron B films. Moron A fails miserably, moron B posts video on the web. A sad epic failure, but perhaps not as epic as the marines's failed disembarking or as sad as the hot brunette's failed striptease.

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There are moments in which, for whatever reason, being it a scientific discovery, a voyage into the unknown, or somebody's excessive alcohol intake, humanity advances one step forward into its destiny, a final state of clarity and peace that will take us all to the stars. This moment complies with the three reasons. Ah, you Ms. Spinning Blonde in Jeans you. We love you.

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Here's a creepy way to advertise a hair salon: stick the lower half of some guys face at the bottom of an escalator, and place various hairstyles on the stairs. As the escalator moves, said guy gets a new haircut with every stair that passes by. Creative? Yes, definitely. Unsettling? Oh hell yes. It's at a mall in Mumbai, so it's not like I'm going to be forced to see it anytime soon, but if there's anything America likes it's slapping advertisements on every surface available, so don't be surprised if you start seeing crap like this in malls and airports in the near future. Check out a shot of the full escalator with all its haircuts after the jump.

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You'd think that by now people would know how to handle those tricky new-fandangled moving stairways. That's gotta be embarrassing. [Glumbert]

Thirty-nine stories in the air, the glass-enclosed escalator at the Floating Garden Observatory in Osaka's Umeda Sky Building is...well, our feelings are best summed up by a Frommer's writer:

I'm not afraid of heights, but taking an escalator over thin air in an earthquake-plagued nation certainly caught my attention; it made the "floating" observatory feel safe in comparison.