Recognizing and Preventing Altitude Sickness

Guest: Christopher Peterson, JD, John J. Flynn Endowded Professor, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah The Senate has just passed a measure easing some of the rules placed on banks after the 2008 financial crisis. The measure got bipartisan support and the House has already passed an even more expansive rollback of Dodd-Frank, which was the name of the original law designed to prevent another banking crash. As it happens, this weekend marks 10 years since the investment firm Bear Stearns collapsed – one of the first big signs that something was seriously amiss in the banking world.

Guest: Morten Wendelbo, Lecturer in Policy Sciences, Texas A&M University The worst of flu season is over, thankfully, because it was a really bad one in just about every state and bringing some of the highest rates of hospitalization we’ve seen in recent years. All those serious flu cases also exposed a major flaw in the US medical system.

Guest: J.P. Gownder, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research By some estimates, up to half of all jobs in the US will be replaced by automation over the next few decades - and not just manual labor. Doctors, therapists and even journalists could be supplanted by smart computers capable of learning and improving over time. But Forrester Research analyst J.P. Gownder thinks those estimates are way overblown. He and his team estimate only a fraction of Americans will be completely out of a job because of automation. The majority of us will have to learn how to work side-by-side with the robots.

(Originally aired: Dec. 19, 2017) Guest: Ruth MacDonald, PhD, Professor and Chair of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Iowa State University Healthy food bloggers and authors like Michael Pollan encourage us to steer clear of food that contains ingredients we can’t pronounce. Aim for clean and simple foods is the mantra. So, something that contains glutamic acid, histidine, methionine, phytosterols and 2-hydroxy-3-methylethl would be a definite no-go right? Except the food I’m describing is a banana. And not even a genetically modified one. Iowa State University food science and human nutrition expert Ruth MacDonald says it’s not just short-sighted, it’s dangerous, to get too carried away with the whole “no chemicals, no preservatives” thing.