Cellular & Microscopic Biology

You may be familiar with the medieval "Black Plague," but did you know that bouts of plague still break out today? Find out what causes an outbreak, why plague still exists and how the plague has influenced history.

By Tracy V. Wilson & Alia Hoyt

How can spam e-mail help fight HIV? Find out how spam e-mail and HIV are linked and learn about new methods for HIV treatment.

By Josh Clark

HIV continues to be a major global public health issue, having claimed more than 35 million lives so far.

By Kevin Bonsor & Oisin Curran

Your body replaces billions (with a b!) of cells every day. In about 100 days, 30 trillion be replaced, but does that mean you're a new person, too?

By Chris Opfer & Allison Troutner

Bacteria are both friend and foe to humanity. They cause and cure health problems, make rotting food stink and give sourdough its delicious taste. Find out how these countless tiny microbes accomplish all of this and more.

By Marianne Spoon

Viruses, viroids and prions are microscopic, infectious particles with a common, despicable goal — but the way each goes about achieving that goal is different.

By Debra Ronca

Pasteurization is the process of removing harmful pathogens from various types of food. How was this process discovered?

By Carol White

Phone calls, e-mails, sign language, friendly shouts -- this is how we communicate in our daily lives. Bacteria, some of the tiniest organisms on Earth, have a different way of talking.

By Molly Edmonds

For something too small to be detected by an ordinary microscope, viruses pack a big punch. We all know they can wreak havoc on the body, but how do they do it?

By Molly Edmonds

Cell suicide sounds unpleasant, but this programmed cell death is the reason your fingers and toes are no longer webbed. What's the story behind apoptosis, and what does it have to do with curing disease?

By Molly Edmonds

You've heard it on the lips of every newscaster and seen it in the pages of every newspaper and Web site: swine flu. Just how worried should we be about the 2009 version of the H1N1 virus?

By Molly Edmonds

Mold is a type of fungus, and it's everywhere — indoors, outdoors and even in the air. But is black mold worse than the rest? Is it as deadly as people say?

By Melanie Radzicki McManus & Austin Henderson

You probably use the words mold and mildew interchangeably. But these two types of fungi aren't quite the same. Is one worse?

By Patty Rasmussen

Yep, fungi are all around us — in the grocery store, in the woods or living on your discolored toenail. And fungi can break down almost anything.

By Jesslyn Shields

No life, except possibly very small bacteria, would exist on Earth without photosynthesis.

By Jesslyn Shields

Chloroplasts are where some of the most miraculous chemistry on Earth goes down.

By Jesslyn Shields

Prokaryotic cells are like single-room efficiency apartments while eukaryotic cells are like mansions with many rooms — and they are the only two kinds of cells in the world.

By Jesslyn Shields

The part of your cells that helps you recover from a hangover is shaped like a maze of tubes and is made of two parts — the rough endoplasmic reticulum and the smooth endoplasmic reticulum.

By Jesslyn Shields & Yara Simón

Centrioles are spindles that create the pathways for chromosomes to follow during cell division.

By Jesslyn Shields

The mass of microorganisms swarming inside your favorite elite athlete's body may be a great business opportunity.

By Amanda Onion

Viruses need hosts to replicate and reproduce. So if a virus has no host, how long can it survive? It depends on a lot of factors.

By Carrie Whitney, Ph.D.

While plant and animal cells are strikingly similar, there are a few key differences.

By Jesslyn Shields & Austin Henderson

When an electron loses its partner, it creates a free radical. So is that free radical now potentially hazardous to your health?

By Michelle Konstantinovsky

It's all connected! Recent rodent research suggests that immune responses and social behavior may be more intertwined than we realized.

By Julia Layton

Dust traveling over the Atlantic from North Africa feeds both phytoplankton that makes the oxygen we breath and the bacteria that could kill us.

By Jesslyn Shields