It is interesting that it usually takes a tragedy to set people straight, and even then some don’t catch on. In October, 2007, 17-year-old Ashton Bonds showed up at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital in rural Virginia, complaining about pain in his side. Less than a week later he was pronounced dead. Ashton was infected with MRSA. MRSA, short for methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a modern day superbug of our own creation. Spawned by the gross over perscription of antibiotics, this superbug is resistant to almost all of the commonly prescribed antibiotics (except vancomyocin).

The scary thing is that this is not the only bug of its kind, there are now several multiple, drug-resistant organisms that have been created. This is just the one we hear about in the news. Other genuses such as Enterococcus, Streptococcus, Neisseria, Salmonella and Mycobacterium tuberculosis all have shown multiple drug resistant strains. So the next time you go to the doctor with a cold, begging for antibiotics, think twice.

The responsibility is on us, not just the doctors, to utilize antibiotic drugs in a responsible way. Antibiotics are a wonderful thing when you really need them, lets hope that they can be as useful to us in the future as they have been in the past.

Today, the well known journal “Science” will be publishing an article about the possibility of using bacteria to alter the weather.

These bacteria actually lower the temperature at which ice crystals can form. This cycle may have evolved because the bacteria need to return to land in order to continue to multiply.

“Biological precipitation, or the “bio-precipitation” cycle, as Sands calls it, basically is this: bacteria form little groups on the surface of plants. Wind then sweeps the bacteria into the atmosphere, and ice crystals form around them. Water clumps on to the crystals, making them bigger and bigger. The ice crystals turn into rain and fall to the ground. When precipitation occurs, then, the bacteria have the opportunity to make it back down to the ground. If even one bacterium lands on a plant, it can multiply and form groups, thus causing the cycle to repeat itself.”

-MSU News

Some of the samples taken by David Sands’ team indicated that up to 85% of the precipitate was the result of bacteria.

Introducing more of these bacteria into drought areas could increase rainfall. Additionally, bacteria could be engineered that are better at increasing the temperatureof ice-crystal formation than the current bacteria. In our very water dependent world, this is an important discovery that is only beginning to be studied.

Apparently, David Sands proposed the idea of bio-precipitation 25 years ago. But at the time, few people accepted his view.

In a few years, this could be information found in our children’s textbooks.

Snow with a high chance of bacteria-MSNB