Topic Reading-Vol.5162-6/12/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers,　

In the lowest place on Earth, a sea is rapidly dying — and no one can agree how to save it

Located on the border between Jordan and Israel, the Dead Sea is an inland salt lake sitting at about 430 meters below sea level, the lowest exposed point on Earth's surface. As the salinity of the lake is about 34%, roughly 10 times saltier than usual ocean water, your body floats easily in the water. However, as climate change has made droughts fiercer and rainfall rarer, the water level has dropped. Also, over the past decades, excess amount of water has been extracted from the Jordan River for increasing population, crops, and livestock, which has significantly reduced the water flow and shrunk the Dead Sea. As a result, the sea level has been dropping by about one meter annually, and as a result, the surface area has shrunk by approximately one-third. Also, the salt water has become too salty to dissolve salt anymore, causing the undissolved salt to form solid crystals and natural salt sculptures. It is an environmental disaster in slow motion, which requires immediate attention and action. Unfortunately, the surrounding countries, Israel and Jordan, are too busy dealing with regional conflicts and extracting minerals from the brine to deal with the clear and present environmental danger. How can we stop the Dead Sea from becoming a dead zone?

Read the article and learn how the world's saltiest water lake has been changing.

https://edition.cnn.com/climate/dead-sea-shrinking-sinkholes

Topic Reading-Vol.5161-6/11/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

People are flooding AI chatbots with health questions. Microsoft is teaming up with Mayo Clinic to help

AI chatbots like ChatGPT are generative pretrained transformers whose interface is designed for conversational interactions. Instead of just retrieving relevant information from cyberspace like search engines, it creates new content, such as writing essays or code, answering questions, and providing suggestions. Such AI is pretrained on massive datasets, including books, articles, and websites, to learn facts and reasoning patterns. If you ask a health question to an AI, it’ll answer your question and provide suggestions based on the health data you rendered. But how accurate and dependable is such health information from chatbots? Recently, Microsoft and Mayo Clinic, a nonprofit American academic medical center, announced that they will work together to build an AI tool trained specifically on medical data to help patients and medical service providers. They hope the medically pretrained AI will potentially power AI tools for clinicians and hospitals and improve AI healthcare assistance for patients via AI chatbots. Since it’ll take years to build and check such an AI tool, until then, use AI with caution when you ask health or medical questions.

Read the article and learn how AI might help improve our health and medical care.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/02/tech/ai-for-healthcare-microsoft-mayo-clinic

Topic Reading-Vol.5160-6/10/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

AI ‘voice cloning’ scams are on the rise. Here’s how to protect yourself

Voice cloning scams are AI-driven frauds where criminals use short audio samples to create an accurate replica of a person’s voice to trick the receiver into transferring money to an untraceable account or handing out cash. Scammers steal voice samples from SNS, YouTube, or voicemail greetings and feed them into AI software to replicate their speech. They use voice skinning to manipulate their voice or text-to-speech tools to make them sound like the person they are mimicking in real time. Also, fraudsters might make the call appear as if it is coming from a known number. Because such calls have become too hard to determine their authenticity, it is advised to look for signs of fraud, such as a sense of urgency or deadline, confidentiality, and the amount of money. Will AI technologies or our smartphones detect AI-generated scams and protect us from fraudsters?

Read the article and learn how technologically advanced scammers are.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/29/tech/ai-voice-cloning-scams-protect-yourself

Topic Reading-Vol.5159-6/9/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

'Mornings and nights no longer exist' at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India

Banda District in Uttar Pradesh, India, sits near the Tropic of Cancer, where the Sun appears directly overhead during the summer solstice. In late May, the hottest month of the region, temperatures of 47-49C continued for nearly 10 days there. Around two million live in the broader Banda, many of whom work outdoors, such as farming, construction, and transport. People start working before sunrise, take a break indoors between noon and around 4 pm, and then resume their work until 7 pm, working for the same hours while enduring the heat. Indeed, they have little or no option but to live with the heat. And the situation has become more intolerable in the last few years as the tree cover has fallen for farming and mining, and sand mining and groundwater depletion have weakened the cooling mechanism in the surrounding landscape. In fact, Banda is part of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, which is regarded as one of the world’s emerging hotspots for dangerous humid heat. It is becoming hotter for longer, and the landscape is losing more trees and water, unendurable conditions for residents, especially for children and elderly people who are vulnerable to extreme heat. Not air conditioning, but trees, shade, and water are more sustainable means for mitigating the heat in Banda.

Read the article and learn about one of the world’s hottest urban environments.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crmp0krp98ro

Topic Reading-Vol.5158-6/8/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

Brain freeze? Ice cream headaches can reveal a surprising amount about your health

When you sip, lick, or bite a cold substance, such as an ice cube, shaved ice, or ice cream, you might feel an acute ache in your forehead. This cold-stimulus headache occurs when the roof of the mouth or back of the throat is cooled so rapidly that it shrinks the blood vessels, and then the shrunk vessels are forced to swell back up again to restore blood flow. This rapid change in the blood flow activates pain receptors and sends signals to the brain, but the brain misinterprets them as coming from the forehead rather than the mouth. That’s why your forehead hurts but not your tongue. It is easily avoidable if you take a little more time to eat or drink cold food or drinks. But some people still experience a more severe headache than others. Researchers think this blood vessel shrinkage seems to run in families. Do your parents have ice cream headaches, too? Also, those who have migraine tend to experience this kind of headache when they eat cold stuff. So, if you feel pain in your brain or forehead when you eat ice cream even if you’ve eaten it slowly, you may want to try the same treatment as for migraine. An ice cream headache can be mostly prevented or eased if you take a little more time to enjoy the cold treat.

Read the article and learn why you may experience a headache when you eat ice cream.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260529-what-causes-brain-freeze

Topic Reading-Vol.5157-6/7/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

The arteries of modern civilization: The US and allies take action to protect seabed cables

Where do you think the vast amount of data is being transmitted every day and every second? Most of the world’s intercontinental data, including payments, trade, and data flows, travels through 570 existing and 80 planned undersea internet cables, the arteries of modern civilization. However, just like underwater gas pipelines, they are so vulnerable to attacks because they have no defense mechanisms or forces. In fact, several incidents of damage to internet cables and gas pipelines have been reported in the Baltic Sea since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Just like the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has created global oil shortages, disruptions to underwater pipelines and cables could cause regional and global nightmares. Recently, Australia, the UK, and the US (AUKUS) have reached a trilateral defense pact to improve reconnaissance and strike capabilities. Since data centers are being built around the world and are connected to each other, protecting the data arteries plays a vital role in ensuring smooth data transmissions and internet connections.

Read the article and learn the roles underwater cables play in modern life.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/31/world/aukus-seabed-cables-defense-intl

Topic Reading-Vol.5156-6/6/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

Why America’s rich keep getting richer

In the “K-shaped economy”, the upper arm of the letter “K” represents the wealthy while the lower arm shows lower-to-middle-income families. In the last three years in the US, the top 1% earners increased their cumulative real net worth by 30%, the next 19% earners gained 20%, and the next 20%, classified as the upper middle group, enjoyed about an 18% increase (Vol 5152), while the middle 40% and bottom 20% had less than a 15% gain. What made the gap wider between those who gained wealth more and less is housing, stocks, and inflation. Even though the S&P 500, the benchmark market index, has gained 86% over the last three years, about three-quarters of America’s stocks are owned by the top 20% earners. As for housing, over half of mortgages belong to the top 20%, whose property values have seen steep increases in the last few years. In the meantime, recent inflation in food, energy, and gas prices, in particular, hit the middle 40% and bottom 20% of income groups harder because they spend a higher proportion of their income on those daily necessities. Once dreamed of by middle-income households were cars and houses, which are now getting out of their reach. How will AI affect the wealth gap for Americans?

Read the article and learn about the widening gap between the rich and others.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/29/business/why-americas-rich-keep-getting-richer