Sometimes it seems like every bit of news that we read is depressing, maddening, or sometimes tragic. In stories that appear to be favorable and wholesome on the surface, our skepticism allows us to see sinister undercurrents.
I think there are a few factors that cause this:
-) a sensationalist news media
-) our own mistrustful and sometimes jaded approach to stories that are marketed as ‘good news’
-) the repeated attempts to package bad happenings in good news like some anecdotal trojan horse
But this is not meant to be an analysis of our system of news.
Instead, I’ve decided to try something a little different. Lately I have been growing weary (as I know many of you have) of all the bad news; it keeps piling on and on. And when there is some kind of ‘good’ news, it is invariably based in Republican schadenfreude and we talk and write about it ad infinitum.
So I’ve decided to use this diary to package up a few genuinely good news stories that you may or may not have heard about that aren’t based on the misfortune of corrupt incompetents.
To start off, let’s talk about Herceptin:
The drug, Herceptin, is already used for advanced cancer. But in three studies involving thousands of women with early-stage disease, it cut the risk of a relapse in half.
(…)
Herceptin, made by Genentech, appears to have “changed one of the most worrisome kinds of cancers into one that may have a relatively good prognosis,” said Dr. Ed Romond of the University of Kentucky.
Read more here (CBS News).
Next, I’d like to move on to something that is totally out of this world.
Of course, I mean the moon. Here there be oxygen! Who knew?
(…)
It is the moon’s small mass and low gravity that prevents it from keeping hold of even a tenuously thin atmosphere. But oxygen needn’t exist only in gaseous form above the ground. It can also be entrained safely in certain kinds of rocks.
(…)
The lunar mineral that may hold the most oxygen promise is ilmenite[…]
(…)
The [Hubble] telescope found what appears to be ilmenite deposits not only at the Apollo 17 site, where it was known to be, but also in Schroter’s Valley and in especially high concentrations in Aristarchus crater. Aristarchus would make an especially good landing site for future geologists, because the impacts that create craters blasts away surface material, providing a detailed look far below ground. Combine that with the ready lode of oxygen-rich ilmenite, and you’ve got a prime spot for a future moon base.
Of course, my first thought on reading this was HOLY SHIT THERE’S AIR ON THE FUCKING MOON. Read more here (Time).
This one is from a couple of weeks ago, but I am so excited by it that I had to include it here.
In the back room of an unmarked brown building in a run-down strip mall, eight machines, each the size of a bass drum, are making diamonds.
(…)
The ability to manufacture diamonds could change business, products and daily life as much as the arrival of the steel age in the 1850s or the invention of the transistor in the 1940s.
In technology, the diamond is a dream material. It can make computers run at speeds that would melt the innards of today’s computers. Manufactured diamonds could help make lasers of extreme power. The material could allow a cellphone to fit into a watch and iPods to store 10,000 movies, not just 10,000 songs. Diamonds could mean frictionless medical replacement joints. Or coatings — perhaps for cars — that never scratch or wear out.
Pretty sweet, eh? Moore’s Law continues to apply. There’s more (USAToday).
So there you have it. There IS some good news out there, you just have to look for it. Sometimes on the moon!
