Good news from science

I like reading articles from a variety of sources. But I've often thought that if you really want to feel hopeful about things, there are two good sources of reading. The first is the Bible which gives us the wonderful news that we are forgiven. No matter how badly we've messed up in life, we can be saved by grace. The other source of hopeful news is reading about advances in science. Yes, often science and the Bible seem to work against each other but that doesn't have to be the case. They are two completely different things. Science is the study of how the Universe works. The Bible explains that the Universe is God's creation and how he created us to be his companions in his universe.

OK, back to the good news from science. I enjoy reading the news at ScienceDaily. Each day you find that we are making progress in discovering how the Earth is made. Each day progress is made in making new materials. Each day we learn how different types of animals and plants live and grow. Every day new proofs are made in mathematics enabling us to use computers more efficiently or to find information where we didn't know it existed. It's amazing how many new things are being learned every day.

Today we learn that medical researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago have found the underlying cause of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease). I lost a cousin to ALS a few years ago. It is a terrible disease that has eluded treatment for a long time. But now, the researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern have found that all forms of ALS have a common cause. You can read the article for more information but to put it simply, ALS occurs when nerve cells fail to recycle waste proteins correctly. The no-longer-useful proteins build up and the nerve cells become damaged. This discovery leads to the possibility of discovering a treatment. And, in other good news, this may also lead to discovering how Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease can be treated because they may have the same mechanism for damaging nerve cells.

As I said, this is wonderful, hopeful news. And, as someone once put it, the answer was always there. We just needed to find it. It takes time and money to find these things and if we were less obsessed with having the softest toilet paper or buying tobacco products or getting a new car every few years, we'd have more money to spend on important research.

I'm adding ScienceDaily to my list of links on the right side of this blog.