Besides serving as food for certain microbes, viruses perform some helpful functions that remain poorly understood. A ciliate, a type of single-celled microbe, swims next to Sphagnum moss, amplified ...

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 ...

New research has uncovered a social world of viruses full of cheating, cooperation and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community. Ever since viruses came to ...

A team at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont has stumbled onto a finding that upends a long-standing ...

COVID-19, flu, mpox, noroviral diarrhea: How do the viruses that cause these diseases actually infect you? Viruses cannot replicate on their own, so they must infect cells in your body to make more ...

Have you ever wondered whether the virus that gave you a nasty cold can catch one itself? It may comfort you to know that, yes, viruses can actually get sick. Even better, as karmic justice would have ...