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 ...

After more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, you might picture a virus as a nasty spiked ball – a mindless killer that gets into a cell and hijacks its machinery to create a gazillion copies of ...

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 ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...

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 ...

In a new study, published in Cell, researchers describe a newfound mechanism for creating proteins in a giant DNA virus, comparable to a mechanism in eukaryotic cells. The finding challenges the dogma ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Ever since viruses came to light in the late 1800s, scientists have set them apart from the rest of life. Viruses were far smaller than ...