The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of biology. They carry genetic material, but they cannot make proteins on ...

Long before humans cultivated crops or sailed between continents, a group of plant viruses was already evolving among wild ...

Many pandemic viruses emerged naturally – but there’s one that most likely came from a lab - Research provides benchmark for distinguishing natural outbreaks from scenarios involving lab leaks ...

Researchers have devised a new tool for discerning between naturally occurring viral outbreaks and those resulting from lab ...

Learn how scientists identified genetic clues that distinguish natural viral spillovers from lab-handled viruses — and why ...

Recent research findings indicate that many of the plant pathogens affecting agriculture today originated during an earlier era than originally believed. Analysis performed by an international team of ...

A new University of California San Diego study published in Cell challenges a long-standing assumption about how animal ...

Russell has a PhD in the history of medicine, violence, and colonialism. His research has explored topics including ethics, science governance, and medical involvement in violent contexts. Russell has ...

Viruses are often thought of as a human problem, however they are the most abundant biological entities on the planet. There are millions of viruses in every teaspoon of river, lake or seawater, they ...

Vaccinating birds against bird flu reduces the spread of the disease, but may have unintended consequences. This is the warning of a new paper in the journal Science Advances, which concluded that ...

The preserved lung of an 18-year-old Swiss man has been used to create the full genome of the 1918 "Spanish flu," the first complete influenza A genome with a precise date from Europe. It offers new ...