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 ...

Viruses are ancient. They have been infecting animals, our ancestors included, for hundreds of millions of years before the first humans ever showed up. And the legacy of those primordial infections ...

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 ...

Some viruses, like the common cold, are a flash in the pan. They infect us, our bodies fight back — which is what makes us sick — and then they’re gone, until the next variant rolls along. Other ...

I’ve had it up to here with viruses lately. It’s easy in these times to wonder whether there’s anything good about them. That made me curious about why viruses exist in the first place, and where they ...

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 ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

Where will the next pandemic come from? One expert says his "bet is on viruses." (Getty Images/Science Photo Libra) Nearly four years after COVID-19 emerged, public health experts already say it’s not ...

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 ...

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 ...