The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Ever since viruses came to light in the late 1800s, scientists have set them apart from the rest of life. Viruses were far smaller than ...

The Human Virome Program will analyze samples from thousands of volunteers in an effort to understand how viruses affect health. By Carl Zimmer The viruses we know best are the ones that make us sick ...

Using genomics, evolutionary biologists test several hypotheses on the origin of viruses. New evidence suggests they may have emerged more times than previously thought. Corroborating the virus-first ...

A new University of California San Diego study published in Cell challenges a long-standing assumption about how animal viruses become capable of sparking human epidemics and pandemics. Using a ...

Suddenly they appear and -- like the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus -- can trigger major epidemics: Viruses that nobody had on their radar. They are not really new, but they have changed genetically. In ...

At a time when not much is known about the scope of hantavirus, we spoke to infection specialists who try and explain the ...

161,979 new RNA viruses have been discovered using a machine learning tool that researchers believe will vastly improve the mapping of life on Earth and could aid in the identification of many ...

We often hear about the importance of the human microbiome – the vast collection of bacteria and fungi that live on and inside us – when it comes to our health. But there’s another, equally important ...