There is a significant body of literature attempting to associate the onset of type 1 diabetes with infection by members of the species B enteroviruses, specifically CVB's (Coxsackieviruses B1 to B6) , if you search pubmed you will find hundreds of manuscripts. The problem has been nailing down a definitive causal relationship, from my understanding it is thought that there may be an element of molecular mimicry involved in the disease (or something similar). Essentially the virus infects the host and damages specific parts of the pancreas, the host's immune system mounts a response to the insult, but in the process creates antibodies that target the hosts own islet cells, resulting in the autoimmune disease that is type 1 diabetes. The problem of definitively implicating CVB's for type 1 diabetes is similar in some ways to that of other enterovirus infections like Polio. Basically there are other host mediated issues at play but with Polio you are able to detect the virus around the time of infection, with diabetes the disease presents after the infection has been cleared, complicating matters. To this day we still don't understand why only about 1% of people infected with Polio will develop paralysis, whilst the majority of people ~95% will show no significant signs of illness. Host factors are really important and not fully understood, there may even be a role for certain bacteria in the gut assisting the infection!
As a side note there has been some recent rumblings about the possibility of viral infections triggering transient type 2 diabetes, I can't link to any papers at the moment (too busy at work) but if anyone is interested I can have a dig around later.
Hopefully the vaccine is able to account for the amount of drift in the enterovirus genome that occurs at up to ~1% per annum, a similar problem exists with the new enterovirus 71 vaccine, an emerging bug similar in presentation to Polio.

"It was all that Dan Marino's fault, everyone knows that. If he had held the Surface, laces out, like he was supposed to, Ray would never have missed that kick. Dan Marino should die of gonorrhea and rot in hell. Would you like a cookie, son?"

...That way you could cover your peripheral vision. Imagine being in a darkened VR room with "something else" somewhere in the building and you keep seeing movement out the corner of your eye. I remember playing Doom 3 for the first time in a pitch black room with the surround sound cranked,it was the first game that made my arm hairs stand on end, VR would be awesome. I'd love to explore my 3D atomic virus models with this as well, it would make measuring and observing subtle changes so much easier. Awesome work guys, bring it on.

Hey thanks "ratbag" for your kind words. The work that Barnes et al. are doing is so important for researchers like us. It opens the door for us to answer questions in a manner that even 5 years ago was considered "ambitious" to say the least. I am very lucky to be in a position where I have access to resources that allow me to explore new ways of answering some very old questions about how viruses behave, with the added bonus that we may hopefully be able to contribute to making the world just a little bit better. Fingers-crossed.

"jkflying" I started off by working in electronics engineering when I left school, funnily enough I was running a company with some friends designing and building robotics systems, mainly focusing in animatronics. I wanted to start using my robotics background to work in the development of prosthetic limbs, but ended up changing the focus of my undergrad from anatomy and physiology to pathology, specifically microbiology with a lot of biochemistry thrown in. My post-grad was in computational biology. I actually started doing the simulation work after playing around with the tutorials on the VMD/NAMD website at the University of Illinois. I would recommend doing them, it's great nerdy fun and it gets you thinking about the different ways that you apply the techniques.

Have a great day:)

Agreed, at this point we are looking at virus dynamics in response to drug binding events and gross alterations in conformational structure in response to significant changes in temperature and ionic content. So for these simulations, the longer the better. I dream of a day when we can model complex host cell interactions and hopefully I will a grey bearded old man still full of enthusiasm when these sort of simulations are considered "run of the mill". Your work helps to keep me excited about the future of HPC and how it can benefit not only my research, but humanity's understanding of the world as a whole. Cheers.

I'd be interested in seeing if this system could run our full Poliovirus simulations (consisting of around 3.5 million atoms). I've run our simulations on the BlueGene/Q at VLSCI using 32,768 cores (65,536 threads) and have been getting a very respectable 11.2 nanoseconds per day of simulation data using NAMD. Some data on our full virus simulations can be found here... (VIDRL supercomputer simulation page). Hey Lank, maybe you can help me figure out a way to crack the millisecond mark for our full-virus sims??? Great work and cheers from down under :-)

Yoda it was...

Cool, thanks SternisheFan, good ol' wiki :) I wonder if it would be possible to record the spectra of light being emitted and then match other meteors with the same spectral pattern. If the fragments that have been hitting lately all have the same colour pattern it may imply that they came from a single source. It's probably already being done, I'm a virologist not an astronomer so I don't know about these things. Surely we have enough high quality "scopes" recording what is going on in the upper atmosphere to compare data. Cheers.

I noticed a lot of the comments saying that the tail was blue/green with a white/ yellow explosion. Is there anyone in the know who can comment if this gives an indication of the meteorites' composition. Green maybe indicating copper content, yellow maybe Sulfur? If so can you use the colour of tail upon entry to identify meteorites that have the same colour as being of the same origin? Just thinkin'

...These little guys can get up to some crazy stuff, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP60WCrQl4U No wonder they are poor models for drug use. Think of the children. Wait, what? Awesome dude.

Initially I thought the headline said the supercomputer was to direct "sheep space traffic". I would get to sleep much quicker knowing that we have a supercomputer doing the sheep counting for me at night.

No Lego!

Is this the same rocket that went for a swim in the Yellow sea today?