Viruses are smaller than bacteria. For example, at 45 nanometers (1 nanometer = 0.000001 millimeter), the hepatitis virus is approximately 40 times smaller than E.coli. By comparison, a human red ...

Seven kinds of virus collectively comprise an important cause of cancer, particularly in less developed countries and for people with damaged immune systems. Discovered over the past 54 years, most of ...

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 ...

Penn Vet’s Louise Moncla has tracked H5N1 viruses to better understand the role wild birds play in the current HPAI outbreak ...

The timing and origin of Zika virus (ZIKV) introduction in Brazil has been the subject of controversy. Initially, it was assumed that the virus was introduced during the FIFA World Cup in June–July ...

Marilyn J. Roossinck receives funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Editor’s Note: You may sometimes have felt like you “have come down with a virus,” meaning that you became sick ...

The DNA of some viruses doesn’t use the same four nucleotide bases found in all other life. New work shows how this exception is possible and hints that it could be more common than we think. All life ...