The New York Times decided earlier this week that biological animation warrants its own article. About time! :)
Seriously, for those of you who haven't discovered BioVisions' amazing animations, you should check them out and/or use them in class - with the caveat that they're not "pure" data:
While acknowledging the potential to help refine a hypothesis, for example, some scientists say that visualizations can quickly veer into fiction. "Some animations are clearly more Hollywood than useful display," says Peter Walter, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Francisco. "It can become hard to distinguish between what is data and what is fantasy."
As it happens, I totally agree.
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