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.

In Lake Malawi, hundreds of species of cichlid fish have evolved with astonishing speed, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study how biodiversity arises.

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Most people alive today carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. Now scientists are gaining a more intimate ...

Scientists at the University of Vienna, Austria, have screened great ape specimens obtained from natural history museums to identify DNA viruses. This groundbreaking study provides unique insights ...

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to ...