Thursday, July 7, 2011

Cells

You are composed of organs, organelles, tissue, cells, bacteria, chromosomes, proteins, and viruses, a virtually uncountable number of tiny living processes that toil mightily to enable you to be you. Look in a microscope, though, and you will see a fuzzy, blurry out-of-focus colorless emptiness. That is because our eyes are not capable of tuning in such tiny activity.

Lucky for us, the team at XVIVO and Biovisions are hard at work making animations based on hard data, to let us imagine these activities as if we could see them. See the "Inner Life of the Cell" animation by Alain Viel, Robert A. Lue and John Liebler, and the dengue fever animation by Irene Bosch and Yorgo Modis.

Your natural nanomachines at work in your cells:



Of course, these videos are a kind of fiction. Things look like they are moving quickly at a human scale, when in fact they move exceedingly slowly at scales where everything is different. See for example the discussion Reynold's number and allometry on the wiki.

For more, see the wiki article on XVIVO animations.

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