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| Covid 19 virus |
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| cleanworkbench:
Just had a thought , do you think the labs are using scanning electron microscopes to take a tour inside the virus as virtual reality and tinker with it to view an outcome in real time ie accelerated graphics , i,m no expert but anyone reckon its feasible . |
| janoc:
No. The labs that are doing the analyses have much better and more important things to do than to tinker with Hollywood style gadgets that wouldn't bring any benefit for their jobs. Also, the fact that you can view a virus using a microscope and that there is a virtual reality helmet available doesn't mean that can just feed video from a microscope into a VR helmet and expect it to "work". You would get only a blurry low resolution mess that would make you nauseous and you wouldn't see anything more than what you can see on the screen of the microscope already anyway. If you really wanted to do this, you would need to know how to: a) Model the behavior of the virus (extremely complex task, notabene when it is something as new as this one where the knowledge is still very limited) so that it can be meaningfully simulated. b) Make such simulations real-time. They aren't, not even close. We are talking typically hours and days of simulation time, and that is for chemical reactions, not a living system which is order of magnitudes more complex than a simple chemical reaction between molecules. In biology it is faster (and more accurate!) to do it in a petri dish than to simulate, especially when we don't even know how to simulate behaviour of anything of this complexity yet! c) To develop an VR application that would interface with such simulation. We are talking enormous amounts of data which you can't simply load into a GPU and let the helmet display it. I did a visualization of chemical reactions in Li-ion batteries last year and about million particles (atoms/molecules) was pushing it already. Even the simplest virus has orders of magnitude larger complexity if you want to simulate effects of e.g. a new drug on it. That would require a lot of very fancy and complex technology to manage such visualization, not to mention the costs of the hardware to run it on. E.g. this paper speaks about 6.5 millions of atoms in a capsid (shell) of a polio virus, which has been simulated for 200ns (!) using a supercomputer (only the capsid, without the virus) : https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.7117/full/ (develops VR applications for living) |
| NiHaoMike:
Doing biological simulations is what the Folding@Home project (and cryptocurrency that uses it for mining, as in Curecoin and Foldingcoin) does. https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=32124 |
| cleanworkbench:
Well i learnt something there , very interesting many thanks . So its down to good old fashion common sense and today,s technology to save us then . |
| Rerouter:
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13510&postid=91696#91696 There is a lot of computing resources being thrown at the problem, and even then it will not be fast to discover its base structure, let alone then using that to attempt simulating how it interacts with everything, Its more a case of searching for what might be a chink in the armor that could them be used to damage it, or interrupt its replication. Re the scanning electron mircoscope, viruses are just a bundle of DNA packaged in the shell, if the shell is closed, they look like popcorn chicken, if open, it is usually too well packaged to be able to take a 3D model of the interior structures. |
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