Well here we are, the first day of June, the month of weddings and school year endings and the Summer Solstice, that longest day of the year when officially goes from Spring to Summer and all the little kiddies get out of school and begin the serious business of enjoying the hell out of not being in class, at least until they started to get bored.

When I was a little kid, I got bored of summer pretty quickly. But then with each successive summer, the time it took me to get bored grew longer and longer, till by high school, I was already at the point where I was thinking “School again already? Damn. ”

But enough personal remembrances. On with the science!

Dear God Japan

We will start off with the weird invention from Japan today, as it is not really all that weird and is barely disturbing at all, and is, in fact, kind of mysterious.

This time, the Japanese have come up with what they are calling a telepresence robot, a field of development they seem to be pursuing with a greater zeal and dedication than any other nation despite the complete and total mystery as to why anyone would want such a thing.

I mean, OK, check this thing out.

Seriously now. What is the frigging point? Why would anyone want a tiny robot on their shoulder that crudely mimics what some remote person is doing? How could that be anything else but incredibly creepy?

And yet, the Japanese seem to be hot after this kind of technology. Just another impenetrable mystery of the mysterious East, I suppose. My theory is that it has something to do with all those soft and hard H anime movies where the shy and hapless male protagonist ends up with a tiny magical chick as a roommate, sex slave, or something along those lines, and I Dream Of Jeannie wackiness ensues.

And did you see that picture of the intended end product? The dude with the hologram on his shoulder? Yeah, that is absolutely nothing like what you have shown us, folks. And even if you could do that, it would still be pretty useless and creepy as hell to boot.

Imagine seeing someone walking down the street talking to a hologram of some geisha on their shoulder. Once you convinced yourself that you had not suddenly been granted the unwelcome ability to see other people’s hallucinations, you would think that person should just talk to their friend on their cell phone like a normal human, wouldn’t you?

Once more, the Japanese have disturbed me with their apparently need to create non-people people.

The Serpents Of Medicine

And I am not talking about the two on the caduceus either.

No, what I am talking about is snake type robots that would be let loose in your body to fix it up.

Let us just pause for a moment to let the icy cold squirmy heebie jeebies we all get at the thought of anything like a snake slithering around inside us subside. Feel free to talk a walk or get a hot drink. I will be here when you get back.

Squickiness aside, the technology is intriguing. With a properly defined “mission”, it would be safe to let an autonomous robot loose in the human body to say, clear arterial blockages, destroy bad cholesterol, patch up faults in the nervous system, and who knows what else.

It would be done under a doctor’s supervision, of course, and would raise the bar for how rigorously something was tested before being used on live human beings (I imagine cadaver testing would be first), but still, it could be a viable tech.

Of course, nanotechnology might beat them to the punch and make medical repair robots the size of virii instead, which you have to admit would be a lot less intrusive.

And a lot less creepy.

I mean, what if you could feel them moving inside you?

The End Of Allergies

And now for the Big Medical News of the Week : some scientists from the University of East Finland think they may be on the trail of a vaccine to end allergies.

And not just one allergy, or specific allergies. All of them. Every single allergy in the world would be cured with a single vaccine.

Boom. Gone forever.

It is an awesome and thrilling thought. Imagine all the serious life-threatening allergies in the world
wiped out like polio. It would be amazing if they could just sure that horrible peanut allergy that has cropped up in the last 20 years or so. Nobody should have to live in fear of peanut butter breath. That is just too much for anyone to have to bear.

But no, they are talking about all allergies. From the big to the small, from deadly auto-histamine disorders (like some forms of arthritis!) to the common sniffles many of us get every spring, gone with a shot.

The vaccine would basically alter the allergens so that they would not trigger a histamine release, and without those pesky histamines, there are no allergic responses.

Now, this begs the question why we have histamines in the first place. What is the point of these responses? I cannot, for the life of me, see the evolutionary advantage of being allergic to something. It is not like a runny nose and watery eyes help you to pass on your genes. If anything, they make you a lot less to do so, as nobody is going to want to make babies with the sneezing guy who is about to be eaten by a sabre toothed tiger.

So I have been pondering the question of what would happen if a person simply had no histamine whatsoever for a while now. I am not so arrogant as to assume if I do not know what it does, it must do nothing and we could get rid of it.

But seriously, Darwin. Allergies. WTF?