In my column this week for the New York Times, I write about the discovery of record-breaking viruses called pandoraviruses. They’re 1000 times bigger than a flu virus and have almost 200 times as many genes–over 2500. That’s twice as many genes as the previous giant-virus record holder, which I blogged about in 2011.

These giant viruses are important to our understanding of what the difference is–if any–between viruses and the rest of life. But they’re also part of a bigger story, one that inspired the title of my recent book A Planet of Viruses. Viruses are the most common life form on Earth, they are by far the most genetically diverse, and we have barely started to explore