Topic Reading-Vol.5166-6/16/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

Rising seas will swallow New Orleans. People need to start relocating now, scientists say

Some coastal regions in the world have already started relocating due to sea level rise and sinking land. Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation, is organizing the world’s first planned migration of the entire country to Australia. Jakarta, Indonesia, is relocating the nation’s administrative capital functions to another island. The USA is no exception. New Orleans, famous for its lively jazz, vibrant Creole culture, and historic French Quarter, sits in a low-lying basin, mostly below sea level. It is surrounded by extensive, highly vulnerable wetlands that are crucial for buffering storm surges, but they are rapidly disappearing due to human activity, land subsidence, and rising sea levels. About 75% of its remaining wetlands are predicted to be lost, and the inland could retreat by as far as 100 km. New Orleans has already lost about a quarter of its population since the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, which submerged 80% of the city and killed nearly 1,400 people. As the city’s residents move out, tax revenues, public services, and home values decline, and as a result, empty or abandoned properties will increase. As protective wetlands disappear, land sinks further, and sea level rises, New Orleans is facing an existential challenge, as critical and urgent as that of the Pacific Islands.

Read the article and learn what is going on in the historic capital of Louisiana.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/25/climate/new-orleans-sea-level-rise-relocation

Topic Reading-Vol.5165-6/15/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

Siesta then fiesta: Enjoy Europe like the locals

Seville, Athens, and Rome. One thing common about these European popular tourist destinations is scorching summer heat. This year, Europe’s heatwave season had already started in late May, marking an all-time May record in London and Budapest, knocking out tennis players at the French Open, and killing over 100 people in heat-related deaths in Spain. If you’re traveling to Europe this summer with an ordinary 9 am-6 pm outdoor itinerary, you’ll be baked just like other tourists. So, instead of going out during the heat hours, how about visiting outdoor tourist destinations early in the morning, staying indoors and taking a siesta in the afternoon, and going out again after sunset to enjoy nighttime tourism? Locals spend the summer days by this work-siesta-work and fiesta schedule to avoid the summer heat while working and enjoying just like in other seasons. In fact, people in Italy and Spain usually have dinner around 9 pm and enjoy after-dinner activities until after midnight. If your body clock is already confused by the jet lag, it may be easier to adjust it not to the local time but to the local customs.

Read the article and learn how to manage your summer travel to Europe.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260605-siesta-then-fiesta-enjoy-europe-like-the-locals

Topic Reading-Vol.5164-6/14/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

AI is changing this job so fast the interview process can’t keep up

Recently, in the US, AI was the most frequently cited reason for job cuts. In fact, various knowledge-based, white-collar jobs have been affected by AI, including administrative support, customer service, writing, translation, and financial and legal analysis. Also, even in the technology industry, many jobs have been replaced or affected by AI, such as junior coders, programmers, technical writers, data analysts, customer support, and web developers. In fact, the landscape of tech jobs is changing so rapidly that hiring companies haven’t even come up with appropriate job qualifications, requirements, or assessments yet. When most tech workers use AI for writing and modifying code, analyzing data, and troubleshooting, the roles of software engineers have shifted from coding skills to designing, judging, and decision-making. That’s why young job seekers with tech majors have difficulty finding their first jobs. What qualifications are required for tech jobs if coding skills don’t qualify, and how should candidates be assessed?

Read the article and learn how AI is affecting the job market in the tech industry.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/28/tech/ai-software-engineering-job-interview

Topic Reading-Vol.5163-6/13/2026

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

From butterflies to breast milk, Uber's list of lost items reveals wild backseat discoveries

Uber operates ride-sharing services in approximately 15,000 cities in 70 countries with over 200 million monthly active users. It is the most widely used rideshare app in the US, dominating more than two-thirds of the nation’s rideshare market. The rideshare giant recently announced its 10th lost-and-found index, an annual list of strange items left behind by riders in the US. It revealed that more items were left in New York than any other city, and Sunday was the day when people left things behind the most. Even though phones are the most essential item for using a rideshare service, more than a million phones were left in the cars. Some of the items that led last year’s lost items trend were vapes and e-cigarettes, Labubu dolls, and Croc sandals (open-toe footwear). Unusual things on the list include a pair of partial teeth in a tissue, pelvis implants, 20 pounds of duck sausage, and a child’s prosthetic eye. While some of the items were tiny or compact, others were bulky or heavy. Make sure to check the seat before leaving the car you rode.

Read the article and learn what items were left in Uber cars.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czr25k7g7d7o

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