Billionaire Space Race Sparks Environmental Concerns
富豪太空競賽惹環保爭議
Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk all have one thing in common; they are multi-millionaires who have financed their own way into space. This modern 21st-century space race, while exciting and promising, is raising some significant concerns about its future carbon footprint.
As of now, rocket launches and space flights don’t occur often enough to cause substantial pollution, but things are expected to escalate quickly if the current pace of development continues. Each spaceship is a fossil fuel guzzling behemoth that can generate carbon emissions equivalent to a jumbo jet flight from London to New York. An increase in space traffic could have a devastating impact on the Earth’s ozone layer and upper atmosphere.
Korean Kimchi Renamed Again as “Xin Qi”
別再叫我泡菜！韓式泡菜正名為「辛奇」
The Chinese transliteration for the Korean word kimchi has always been a tricky issue. In 2013, South Korea made an effort to create a reasonable Chinese translation for kimchi to differentiate it from the pao cai used in China’s Sichuan Province. Since there is no equivalent for the “kim” sound in Chinese, an accurate transliteration was not possible. After much analysis and comparison, the name xin qi was chosen.
The word was unpopular, though, and was changed back to pao cai. Recently, a pool of 16 candidate translation names was put up for selection as the new term, with xin qi being among them. It was determined that the pronunciation of xin qi was the most similar to the original Korean word. It also carries the meanings of spicy and novel, and was therefore the best choice.
