Toggle light / dark theme

I have a four-foot-tall robot in my house that plays with my kids. Its name is Jethro.

Both my daughters, aged 5 and 9, are so enamored with Jethro that they have each asked to marry it. For fun, my wife and I put on mock weddings. Despite the robot being mainly for entertainment, its very basic artificial intelligence can perform thousands of functions, including dance and teach karate, which my kids love.

The most important thing Jethro has taught my kids is that it’s totally normal to have a walking, talking machine around the house that you can hang out with whenever you want to.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Sister Ilia Delio PhD. OSF, a Franciscan Sister (Order of St Francis of Washington, DC) who holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University.

Ira Pastor Comments:

On previous shows, as we’ve spent time discussing the bio-architecture of life, we have spent time at various levels of this unique hierarchy, from the very, very small (as we’ve delved into topics like quantum biology), to the very large (as we discussed themes like chronobiology), and a lot of domains in between: the genome, micro-biome, systems biology, etc.

Today, however, we are going to further and deeper than we’ve ever been before.

Herbs to increase breast milk supply and heal the spleen. Traditional remedies which promise to cure insomnia and acne. Secret cancer treatments that have been ignored or suppressed by Western medicine.

Practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) have a long history of making outsized claims, not least in the case of fertility and virility, where demand for tiger penis and rhino horn has devastated wild populations.

Quackery and false claims exist in all branches of medicine, but doctors in Europe are concerned that unverified claims made under the guise of TCM are being spread worldwide by social media, inadvertently aided by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Germany’s prized industrial robotics and automation sector is expecting a drop in sales this year for the first time since the global financial crisis, an industry body said on Friday.

The Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA) is expecting sales to fall by five percent to 14.3 billion euros ($15.8 billion) this year.

This would be the first drop since the 32-percent plunge seen in 2009 in the wake of the crisis.

We’re currently in dire need of new weapons against infectious bacteria, especially those in a tough-to-kill class known as gram-negative bacteria. Now, researchers at Northeastern University have discovered just that, hiding in the gut of a tiny, soil-dwelling, parasitic worm. Tests on mice have so far proved promising.

For decades we’ve had the upper hand over bacteria, clearing out many infections fairly easily with antibiotics. But extensive use has led to an arms race between us and bacteria. As they evolve resistance to our best drugs, we develop new ones and use those until the bugs become resistant to those too.

But this cycle is starting to break down, and not in our favor. Developing new drugs is time and cost-intensive process, and bacteria are evolving resistances faster than we can keep up. There are now “superbugs” that are resistant to all known drugs. The situation is getting so bad that a recent report warned that superbugs could kill up to 10 million people a year by 2050, casting us back into the “dark ages of medicine.”