Science News

Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a study released on Tuesday.

At just over seven feet tall, Shaquille O’Neal is easy to spot in crowd. But the individual virus structures that give him, and us, a cold aren’t so easy to see.

Researchers report that viruses deprived of their usual channel for infiltrating the E. coli bacterium evolved a different route into the cells in little more than two weeks.

Scientists in northern Europe are scrambling to learn more about a new virus that causes fetal malformations and stillbirths in cattle, sheep, and goats. For now, they don’t have a clue about the virus’s origins or why it’s suddenly causing an outbreak; in order to speed up the process, they want to share the virus and protocols for detecting it with anyone interested in studying the disease or developing diagnostic tools and vaccines.

Way back in 1897, someone from the Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City buried a time capsule, stuffed with bacteria, in one of the building's cornerstones.

A team of top hackers working for Intel Corp's security division toil away in a West Coast garage searching for electronic bugs that could make automobiles vulnerable to lethal computer viruses.

Michigan State University researchers have seen for the first time that the Lambda virus can mutate in a short time (4 mutations in just 12 days) and found new ways to attack host cells.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Columbia University researchers have demonstrated how hackers can use printers not only to infect computer systems and steal information but to set printers on fire.

While the human papillomavirus (HPV) is known for infecting genitals, it can also spread quickly via oral sex, causing throat cancer disproportionately in men, says a new study. "Researchers examined 271 throat-tumor samples collected over 20 years ending in 2004 and found that the percentage of oral cancer linked to the human papillomavirus surged to 72 percent from about 16 percent, according to a report released yesterday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology."

When you get the flu, viruses turn your cells into tiny factories that help spread the disease. In this animation, NPR's Robert Krulwich and medical animator...