Computers That Can Predict Explosions and Bore into Your Skull

Chris Johnson is a master of representing 3D scientific information related to air currents, heat, and the physics of light. In other words, he creates highly-accurate virtual explosions like the one you see above breaking out of a container. At the AAAS conference today, he gave a presentation about the latest cool images and videos created where he works: the Scientific Computing and Imaging Group at the University of Utah. The group creates fire and explosion simulations for chemists, amazing 3D medical images of the human body, and recently made rather haunting depictions of the ways genetically-engineered mice develop differently from normal ones. Here are a few more of the images he discussed. More »