The Life Cycle of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is an ugly bug that is rendered strikingly beautiful in an animation from Maastricht University in the Netherlands. They explain what happens from the time a virus particle invades your lungs until it spews out the many copies of itself it has reproduced. The chemical reactions went over my head at times, but never lost my interest. Keep in mind this is the "general version." They go into much more detail in the "scientific version," which you can see here. 

What really amazes me about this video is how anyone ever learned so much about a virus. They are tiny compared to the individual cells of our body, which are already, well, microscopic. Here we see individual proteins working in tiny parts of a single virus. The teams of virologists and molecular biologists working on COVID-19 research deserve every bit of respect for figuring all this out.  (via Kottke)