As the U.S. faces down the COVID-19 Delta variant – now fast-becoming the nation's dominant strain – reports of a new Lambda variant that first emerged in Peru in August 2020 are gaining the attention ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

Live virus vaccines use a weakened virus to help your body fight the real disease. Some people, like those who are very sick or pregnant, should not get live virus vaccines. A live virus vaccine ...

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 number of factors influence the way the virulence of a virus — that is, how harmful it is to its host — affects its ability to survive and spread; in some cases, higher virulence may help a virus ...

There is no evolutionary signal suggesting that these viruses were being “pre-adapted” for humans prior to their outbreaks. Instead, measurable changes in selection typically appeared only after ...