Perhaps one of the best things about awareness months, even if they bring focus to maladies and situations that are not always pleasant, is to get people interested to learn about the topic, and if they're interested enough, they'll do something to help out. This is the case with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Some time back, there was the Ice Bucket Challenge which went viral, involved numerous athletes and celebrities and common people, and raised a ton of money for research and to support the afflicted people around the world. Yet, although I know it is a motor neuron disease and that it has affected famous people like the late brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking and more recently, the respected baseball media personality and fellow UChicago alum Sarah Langs (she's not even that old!), I found that I knew remarkably little about the disease itself. So this May, which is ALS Awareness Month, let's learn a little bit more together.

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, it has been exciting to see a lot of the science fiction gradually become science fact, even from the classic episodes with Captain Kirk and Mister Spock. From automatic doors to cellular phones, and even the computing innovations we take for granted such as the Google search engine, touch screen iPads, and the Alexa voice-activated assistant, science fiction like Star Trek has fed our imaginations to turn concepts into reality, such as this happy goofball (albeit a very resourceful goofball) making Doctor Octopus tentacles. I will continue sprinkling in Star Trek references because many of the neuroscience-based innovations in this post seem inspired by mere words on a script page that turned into an "aha" moment on screen, but as paraphrased from Arthur C. Clarke's laws, nothing is truly impossible with the right kind of science.