Topic Reading-Vol.4638-1/4/2025

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

2024 has been a nerve-wracking year for plane travel. How safe is it really?

Last year, there were two fatal airplane incidents in December alone. One was the Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243, an Embraer 190 aircraft, that crashed, or shot down, in Kazakhstan on Christmas day that killed 38 people on board, leaving 29 survivors. On the 29th, South Korea’s Jeju Air’s flight 2216, a B737-800, arriving from Bangkok with 175 passengers and six crew members crashed and caught fire at a local airport in South Korea, and all but two crew members were killed. In the meantime, on January 2 last year, a Japan Airlines A350 aircraft collided with a Japan Coast Guard aircraft on a runway at the busy Haneda Airport, Tokyo. Still, all 379 passengers and crew members of the plane evacuated from the burning aircraft, which was burnt to ashes only minutes later. How safe is it to fly? Statistics show that in recent years, the risk of commercial flight accidents was around one in every million or so flights and the risk of per boarding is around one in 14 million. If you compare these with those on the road, car accidents occur much more frequently and kill more people. Do these stats make you feel safer to fly?

Read the article about how safe, or unsafe, it is to fly on a commercial flight.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/30/business/plane-travel-crash-safety-record/index.html

Topic Reading-Vol.4637-1/3/2025

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

Japan’s scenic hot springs town restricting tourists amid fights over the best photo spots

Fueled by the weak Japanese yen, a record number of tourists visited Japan last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2019. Those visitors aren’t just visiting those historically popular towns like Tokyo and Kyoto but are now exploring hot remote destinations like Ginzan Onsen, or a silver mine hot spring, in Yamagata prefecture. It takes several hours from Tokyo by bus, train, or airplane because the hot spring town sits away from the highway, train station, or airport. This remote hot spring town has been visited by an increasing number of foreign tourists lately because of the famous snow-covered sights in the winter when the whole town and area are covered with heavy snow. There are a-century-old buildings in the center of the town. It is a pedestrian-only district whose bridges and streets are lit by gaslight. Like other SNS hot spots such as Kamakura-Kokomae station in Kamakura and Fuji-Kawaguchiko town, those tourists are so eager to get a hot photo spot that they often ignore traffic rules, cause congestion, and dispute or even fight each other. The hot spring had no choice but to require day visitors to buy tickets after 8 pm and drivers to park their cars away from the town and use the shuttle bus to the town. Overtourism is now everywhere. 

Read the article and learn how a remote hot spring town is trying to manage the surging visitors.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/27/travel/japan-ginzan-onsen-limiting-entry-overtourism-intl-hnk/index.html

Topic Reading-Vol.4636-1/2/2025

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

Kakeibo: The Japanese art of saving money

Do you know if you are spending your money wisely? Not so many people do not keep track of how much they spend on what each month. Tracking expenditures is a nuisance and annoyance partly because it reminds you how much you wasted. But it helps you get your spending under control just like companies and organizations budget expenses and manage finances. 

“Kakeibo” is a Japanese budgeting method that helps households manage their finances and save money. It was developed by a female magazine journalist in 1904. It focuses on mindful spending and saving, an attitude towards budgeting by showing the record keeper how to spend and save well by tracking income, fixed expenditures, savings, and living expenses. Indeed, if you sort and record all the cash inflows and outflows, you’ll become more conscious of how you spend your money especially when you write them down on paper. When inflation persists, you definitely want to get your finances under control not only to make ends meet but also to save for the future or enjoy your life today.

Watch the video to learn how a simple booking technique could help manage your finances.

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0g6q7wd/kakeibo-the-japanese-art-of-saving-money

Topic Reading-Vol.4635-1/1/2025

Dear MEL Topic Readers, 

Nasa makes history with closest-ever approach to Sun

A happy new year to you. Did you have a chance to see the first sunrise of the year?

Named after an American solar and plasma physicist, the Parker Solar Probe is a NASA space probe launched in 2018 to observe the Sun’s outer corona. The 1m x 3m x 2.3m probe travels faster than any human-made object at nearly 700,000 km/h, fast enough to travel from London to New York in less than 30 seconds. It is protected by a thick carbon-composite shield to endure the Sun’s heat, as high as 1,400C, and radiation. On December 24, the probe successfully made its 22nd fly-by the Sun, the closest one about six million kilometers from the Sun’s surface. That was much more inner than Mercury’s orbit and was only four centimeters from the Sun if the Sun and the Earth's distance were one meter. But why do we need to study the Sun and its corona? Corona is mysterious but influential in our lives. Its temperature reaches over a million degrees while the Sun’s surface temperature is around 6,000C. Why? Also, the probe may find clues about the solar wind, the charged particles bursting from the corona, which affects electricity grids, electronic devices, and communication systems. 

Read the article and learn about the solar probe that might help us understand our Sun and its corona better.

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