The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Researchers have devised a new tool for discerning between naturally occurring viral outbreaks and those resulting from lab ...

The origin of life on Earth becomes even more fascinating and complex as we peer into the mysterious world of viruses. Said to have existed since living cells first appeared, these microscopic ...

A giant virus discovered in Japan is adding fuel to the provocative idea that viruses helped create complex life. Named ushikuvirus, it infects amoebae and shows unique traits that connect different ...

Vaccinating birds against bird flu reduces the spread of the disease, but may have unintended consequences. This is the warning of a new paper in the journal Science Advances, which concluded that ...

The unusual cases of pneumonia began to appear in midwinter, in China. The cause, researchers would later learn, was a coronavirus new to science. By March, the infection began to spread to other ...

Recent research findings indicate that many of the plant pathogens affecting agriculture today originated during an earlier era than originally believed. Analysis performed by an international team of ...

In 2003, Jean-Michel Claverie made a discovery in bacterial genomics that would change his career trajectory and begin a new era in microbiology. “One day, we found a very strange beast that nobody ...