infectious disease – Quanta Magazine

The Viral Paleontologist Who Unearths Pathogens’ Deep Histories

Marta Zaraska — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 13:06:13 +0000

Like many children of his generation, raised on a steady diet of Jurassic Park and its sequels, Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer wanted to be a paleontologist when he grew up. Unlike most, he came close. Rather than digging for fossilized bones in the dirt, however, he paws through objects in natural history museums and medical collections for old biological specimens from which he can extract the...

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Viruses Finally Reveal Their Complex Social Life

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 14:55:46 +0000

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 cells, and inside their protein shells they carried little more than genes. They could not grow, copy their own genes or do much of anything. Researchers assumed that each virus was a solitary particle drifting alone through the world, able to replicate only if it...

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How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick?

Tara C. Smith — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:19:23 +0000

For a pathogen to make us sick, it must overcome a lot. First it has to enter the body, bypassing natural barriers such as skin, mucus, cilia and stomach acid. Then it needs to reproduce; some bacteria and parasites can do this virtually anywhere in the body, while viruses and some other pathogens can only do so from within a cell. And all the while, it must parry attacks from the body’s immune...

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What Has the Pandemic Taught Us About Vaccines?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 08:37:47 +0000

As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, scientists raced to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus killing millions around the world. Large segments of the global population, including many people who had not worried much about infectious diseases for decades, were suddenly hanging on the success of those efforts. Vaccines have been around for so long that it’s easy to take them for...

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Can Our Brains Be Taken Over?

Tara C. Smith — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 15:00:41 +0000

In The Last of Us, a video game series and recent television show, fungal pathogens are to blame for a zombie-like plague. Once infected, humans lose control over their bodies and become increasingly aggressive, seeking to infect others through violence. It’s a familiar trope: The same fungus, Ophiocordyceps, torments humanity in the movie The Girl With All the Gifts, while viruses do the work in...

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