ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Virtual Physiological Rat

Alright, kiddo, have you ever heard of a rat? It's a small furry animal with a long tail that scurries around in the dark. Well, scientists always like to learn about different animals, like rats, and how they work. But sometimes, it's hard to study real rats because they live for a short time and we can't see inside their bodies most of the time. That's where the Virtual Physiological Rat comes in!

The Virtual Physiological Rat is a computer program that helps scientists learn all about how a rat's body works. They use computer models to imagine what it would be like to look inside a real rat and understand how its organs function. The program helps scientists learn about things like how blood flows through the rat's body, or how its lungs take in air, or how its heart beats.

The scientists make the virtual rat by using a lot of data from real rats. They study pictures of the rat's organs, measure how fast it breathes, and how hard its heart beats. They put all this information into the computer program so that they can see the rat working in real life, just like if they were holding it in their hands.

Because the virtual rat is made using scientific data, it behaves in the same way as a real rat, but we can experiment with it in ways that we can't experiment with real monkeys or humans, for example. That's why it is so useful for scientists to study how the rat's body works and develop new medicine or treatments for different problems.

So, the Virtual Physiological Rat is an amazing tool that scientists use to understand how real rats work, and it helps them make important discoveries that could someday help humans, too!