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.

Gravity seems to be able to do work, and it can never be used up. In stars, it causes hydrogen to be crammed together, creating massive amounts of energy. On earth, we can utilize it through riding a bike or creating hydroelectric power. It seems intuitively incorrect for things to have an infinite supply of energy simply because of having mass. Yet, gravity effects everything with mass, and there has yet to be evidence that you can run out of it.

Some say the Theory of Relativity gets around this issue by asserting that gravity isn’t actually a force, it is simply a result of space curvature. I don’t think space curvature adequately answers this question. Space curvature seems to be a viable explanation behind why objects are drawn to other objects with greater mass. The analogy of a bowling ball on a mattress is often used. But, just like in this analogy, curvature still requires the existence of a force that continuously pulls space towards dense deposits of matter. Seemingly, this force is never extinguished.

However, there is a major practical hurdle in utilizing this energy. Something has to be moved for work to be done; after gravity has moved an object, energy must be expended against gravity for the object to be moved again. Tesla claimed to have figured out a way to access limitless energy. Supposedly this discovery was based on his Dynamic Theory of Gravity, which unified the theories of gravity and electromagnetism. But, he came up with this theory at the end of his life, and died before publishing the papers. Upon his death, the U.S. government confiscated much of his work, so who knows whether his claims were justified.

I do not have PhD in theoretical physics. So, if anyone understands where my misunderstanding is please correct me.