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In recent years, antibiotic-resistant bacteria has become such a concern that the World Health Organization has cautioned of a “post-antibiotic era,” which may be here soon. According to the CDC, in America alone around 2 million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant infections annually and in less developed countries it is quickly becoming one of the greatest concerns in public health.

In an urgent search for new natural antibiotics, scientists are examining ancient remedies in order to determine what made them effective. One such remedy comes from the Boho Highlands of Northern Ireland, where ancient Irish Druids utilized natural antibiotics from the soil. Inverse reports the findings of these scientists, published in Frontiers in Microbiology:

[The] alkaline soil sampled from the Sacred Heart Church in the town of Toneel North contains a new strain of bacteria they named Streptomyches sp. myrophorea. Testing revealed that this strain inhibited the growth of four of the six multi-resistant pathogens identified by the WHO as “high priority pathogens.”

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For the first issue of the PCMag Digital Edition in 2019, we’re fast-forwarding to envision what technology—and our tech-driven society—will look like in 2039. We wanted to explore the myriad ways in which tech will be more intertwined with our lives and will have changed our culture. To do so, we interviewed a select group of futurists, execs, academics, researchers, and a speculative fiction writer, who gave us some thoughtful predictions.

We asked futurists, tech execs, academics, researchers, and a sci-fi writer to imagine our tech-driven society in 20 years. Take a peek into the future.


In the body, messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules are in charge of instructing cells to produce specific proteins, and hijacking this natural system is emerging as a promising new way to treat a wide variety of illnesses. Now, researchers at MIT have developed an inhalable mRNA aerosol that can take the molecules directly to the lungs, as a potential new treatment for cystic fibrosis or lung cancer.

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The Milky Way is under threat: new research from astrophysicists at Durham University, UK, suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) will dramatically collide with our galaxy in two billion years’ time.

It was previously predicted that the Milky Way would collide with the nearby galaxy of Andromeda in between four billion and eight billion years’ time, turning both galaxies into one combined giant elliptical galaxy. But now it seems that long before that collision happens, the Milky Way will be impacted by the LMC, the brightest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way which currently sits around 163,000 light-years from us.

The new prediction, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was made once it was discovered that the LMC has nearly twice as much dark matter as previously believed, meaning that it has a much larger mass than was expected which affects the way that it interacts with other nearby galaxies. The increased mass means that the LMC is losing energy at a high rate and will inevitably collide with the Milky Way.

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What is the deadliest animal on earth? It’s a question that brings to mind fearsome lions, tigers, sharks, and crocodiles. But the answer is an animal that is no more than 1 centimeter long.

A few mosquito species, out of the thousands that populate different environments, are the deadliest animals on earth. Anopheles mosquitoes alone, transmit malaria through their bite and annually infect more than 200 million people, and are responsible for 400,000 deaths per year, of which 70 percent are children under the age of 5.

Other mosquito species also transmit diseases — dengue, West Nile, and Zika — through their bite.