Many microbes wear beautifully patterned crystalline shells, which protect them from a harsh world and can even help them reel in food. Now scientists have zoomed in on the very first step in ...

A new review reveals how tiny shell-building plankton quietly drive carbon cycling and influence global climate change.

Research led by a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, shows how viruses form protective shells (capsids) around their genomes, a process that—while messy and complex—consistently ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Viruses -- small disease-causing parasites that can infect all types of life forms -- have been well studied, but many mysteries linger. One such mystery is how a spherical virus ...

A virus is a small infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses can infect all types of life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including ...

Symmetry is a feature of many plants, animals and even some molecules — like water. But that’s not the case with snails and their coiled shells. They are chiral — asymmetrical in such a way that they ...

With hard bony shells to shelter and protect them, turtles are unique and have long posed a mystery to scientists who wonder how such an elegant body structure came to be. Since the age of dinosaurs, ...

In the late 1700s, a woman named Bridget Atkinson collected over a thousand seashells from all over the world without ever leaving her village in the rural English county of Cumberland. FRANCES ...