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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.

Bacteria are amazingly adaptable¹. They live in hot springs, in the dead sea and of course inside people where they can dish up some truly nasty diseases. Over the years many of these crafty² critters have figured out how to dodge³ the antibiotics⁴ we use to kill them, usually by chewing the drugs up and spitting them out. Now researchers from Harvard Medical School have figured out that in the soil there are bacteria that are not only immune to our antibiotics, they eat antibiotics for breakfast. The discovery appears in the April 4 issue of Science. The scientists collected a diverse sample of soils, from cornfields, forests, swamps even the Boston public garden. From this dirt they isolated⁵ hundreds of different bacteria that could grow in a broth⁶ that contained nothing to eat except a great big helping⁷ of antibiotics. The fact that the ground is teeming⁸ with drug munching⁹ bugs¹⁰ might seem surprising but remember most of our antibiotics come from organisms that live in the dirt, like moulds and even other bacteria. With that kind of exposure some bugs are bound to figure out how to turn these potential toxins¹¹ into a tasty snack. The danger for us is that they will share these recipes with their disease-causing pals¹².

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.