Topic Reading-Vol.3283-4/7/2021

Dear MEL Topic Readers,

Number of ATMs in China shrinks by 80,000 in 2020

In China, the number of Automatic Teller Machines, or ATMs, per 100,000 adults was 84 in 2017, 97 in 2018, 95 in 2019, and 72 in 2020. You can see a rapid increase from 2017 to 2018 and then a sharp decline from 2019 to 2020, or 80,000 fewer ATMs last year alone. These changes clearly show how much Chinese people are relying on non-cash payment, mobile payment in particular recently. In fact, the transaction volume of bank deposits and withdrawals started to decline in 2015 but banks had been adding more ATMs until 2018. Indeed, ATMs are expensive devices to produce and operate. You can easily imagine that ATMs must be guaranteed the highest quality and precision as they count bills and coins accurately and provide the exact amount of cash. Also, they need to be collected and supplied cash from time to time, which involves costly transportation with security. Furthermore, they need to monitored constantly for security reasons. When China’s central bank rolls out digital currency in near future, those who have smartphones will mainly or almost only use Alipay, WeChat Pay, or Digital Currency in China even though cash will stay at least for a while. Will foreign travelers be able to use such non-cash payments in China?

Enjoy reading the article and think about the day when there are no ATMs even in a bank.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/02/WS6066d6c9a31024ad0bab3595.html

Topic Reading-Vol.3282-4/6/2021

Dear MEL Topic Readers,

Mama bear's struggle with cubs looks hilariously familiar

If a mom has a few kids and tries to have them do the same thing at the same time, she gets really busy keeping them and things in order. The same is true for wild animals. When a mama bear tried to go across a seemingly busy street with her cubs that all looked like about the same ages, she really had to struggle to make them follow her. They were all doing very different things from what she wanted, climbing a tree, sitting down, and going backward in front of dozens of cars that were stopped by the bear family’s roadshow. While the drivers felt sorry for the desperate mama bear trying to her cubs cross the road safely, they also enjoyed watching little cubs behaving cutely and innocently. Did the mama bear sweat?

Enjoy watching the video of this somehow familiar scene.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/03/31/mother-bear-and-cubs-cross-road-moos-pkg-vpx.cnn

Topic Reading-Vol.3281-4/5/2021

Dear MEL Topic Readers,

Switzerland's female soldiers can finally stop wearing men's underwear

The Swiss Armed Forces are Switzerland’s military that consists of a small number of regular soldiers and conscripts or volunteers in the army and air force. While maintaining the compulsory military service to all men, Swiss has been reducing the number of active personnel from 400,000 to 100,000. Among the regular service forces, less than 1% of the personnel are women, who are supplied only men’s underwear. Now, in order to increase the female proportion to 10% by 2030, the Swiss army announced to bring in women’s undergarments. A big change.

But if female soldiers were only provided men’s underwear, what about other conditions, such as toilets, barracks, and other privacies?

Enjoy reading the article and learn about the Swiss Army’s ongoing changes.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/31/europe/swiss-army-female-recruits-underwear-scli-intl/index.html

Topic Reading-Vol.3280-4/4/2021

Dear MEL Topic Readers,

Japan's cherry blossom 'earliest peak since 812'

For nearly all the Japanese people, cherry blossom flowers are the most enjoyable flowers historically and culturally. As they are the symbol of the spring in Japan where new things and lives start including schools, financial year, and new grads’ employment. Surprisingly, there have been records as to when cherry blossoms, or Sakura, bloomed since the 9^th century. Of course, some years they flowered early, but it is obvious that Sakura in Kyoto has been blooming earlier since around 1800 when the industrial revolution started emitting greenhouse gasses. And this year, they broke the previous record. The phenomenon is not limited to Kyoto. Cherry blossom season in Hiroshima began eight days earlier than the previous record in 2004.

As posted yesterday in Vol.3279, the world is surely experiencing earlier springs and longer summers.

Enjoy reading the article and learn about this phenological analysis of Sakura in Japan.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56574142

Topic Reading-Vol.3279-4/3/2021

Dear MEL Topic Readers,

By the end of the century, summer weather could last half a year (and that's not a good thing)

Was May or October in your childhood as warm as these days? Didn’t you have more snow in winter when you were a kid? Most people now feel hotter summers and warmer winters these days. Are longer summers good news or bad news? It is for beachgoers and mountain climbers as well as resort businesses that can enjoy longer seasons. But as summers are getting longer, other seasons are getting shorter and the world is becoming hotter on average. According to a new study, the length of summer increased from 78 to 95 days while that of spring, fall, and winter decreased by 9, 5, and 3 respectively over the last six decades. We all know that emissions of Greenhouse gases are the main cause of warming temperatures and climate change. If more Greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, summer could become as long as half a year by the end of the century, less than eighty years from now. And every year, we’ll be experiencing hotter and longer summer. The impacts of longer and hotter summer, or warmer climate, are significant to human life and ecosystems, including agriculture, extreme weather conditions and natural disasters, diseases carried by mosquitoes, and allergies by increased pollen. And remember. The more air conditioners are used for a longer time, the hotter the outside will become and the more greenhouse gases are emitted.

Read the article about another evidence of global warming and think

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/23/weather/climate-change-hotter-summers-trnd/index.html

Topic Reading-Vol.3278-4/2/2021

Dear MEL Topic Readers,

Extinction: Elephants driven to the brink by poaching

Modern-day poaching is usually done for sport or commercial profit, both in legal and black markets. For example, killing the rhinoceros for its horn, the African elephant for its ivory, and the pangolin for the skin. Poaching threatens many wild species, particularly those protected in wildlife reserves or national parks and it is a major cause of the population decline especially for African elephants, both bush elephants, and forest elephants, which are considered endangered species along with land degradation and fragmentation. In fact, the number of forest elephants declined over 80% in the past 30 years and bush elephants fell by over 60% in the last half-century. Since elephants need large areas and move long distances to live regardless of the human-set borders, international cooperation is required to stop poaching and conserve their habitats. We don’t want our descendants to learn about the elephant just like the mammoth, do we?

Read the article and learn about the challenges to save the African elephant.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56510593

Topic Reading-Vol.3277-4/1/2021

Dear MEL Topic Readers,

'Ice-cream toothache': Cold food and drinks pain explained

Do you feel toothache when you have ice cream or iced drink? Some people have sensitive teeth to such sudden temperature drops. But why? Researchers found that if the underlying dentine below enamel becomes exposed, painful stimuli will cause pain. Such enamel exposure could be caused by tooth decay or gum disease. So, if you feel pain often when you have cold food or drink, you may want to have your teeth checked by a dentist. In the meantime, such tooth pain or dentine hypersensitivity can be treated by specifically designed toothpaste or even chewing gum. However, they won’t cure the cause of the pain. So, in any case, if you feel pain, you’d better see the dentist. Indeed, nerves are there to warn problems.

Enjoy reading the article and learn about the mechanism of toothache by cold stuff.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56536300