An electron arrives.
It's been launched at 10,000 electron-volts — typical energy for medical X-rays. As it tears through water, it knocks electrons off molecules and slows down, leaving an ionization trail behind.
A single electron tears through water molecules. Thousands of reactive chemicals scatter, find DNA, and break it apart — all in a microsecond. For twenty years, simulating this took a supercomputer and a PhD. Now it runs in your browser tab.
The viewer plays back a real simulated event in 4D — three spatial dimensions, plus time, scrubbing through a microsecond of radiation chemistry.
It's been launched at 10,000 electron-volts — typical energy for medical X-rays. As it tears through water, it knocks electrons off molecules and slows down, leaving an ionization trail behind.
Each ionization splits a water molecule into reactive chemicals — hydroxyl radicals (OH), solvated electrons (e⁻aq), hydrogen, hydronium. Tens of thousands per electron. They diffuse, react, recombine. This is the cloud you'll watch evolve.
Some radicals find DNA strands. Most cause a single break. A few — the bad ones — break both strands within ten base pairs of each other. That's a double-strand break, the lesion behind cell death and mutation.
Cancer radiotherapy is dose calibration on this microsecond.
Astronaut shielding for Mars missions is dose calibration on this microsecond.
Whether your CT scan is safe is dose calibration on this microsecond.
For decades, only a handful of national-lab teams could see what you're about to see. Now anyone with a laptop can.
It runs in a browser, but it isn't a toy. Validated, head-to-head, against the gold-standard scientific simulator (Geant4-DNA, the same code radiobiology labs cite in published papers).
Three drafts, copy-and-go. Pick the voice that's closest to yours and edit freely.
Just clicked a button and watched 50,000 reactive radicals attack DNA in real time, in a browser tab. No install. webgpudna.com 🤯
Geant4-DNA — the radiobiology Monte Carlo toolkit physicists run on HPC clusters — now runs in your browser via WebGPU. Validated against the 11.4.1 reference. Click "View ready demo" and watch a microsecond of radiation chemistry play. webgpudna.com
One of the more 'wait, what?' demos I've seen lately — a working DNA-damage simulator running entirely in WebGPU. The kind of thing that needed a supercomputer last decade. webgpudna.com