It's been too long since I've shared any real illustrations, so it's about time. Dong Wang's group at UCSD has used sophisticated computer simulations to track the movement of an RNA polymerase along a DNA template at atomic resolution and on the millisecond timescale. They were able to get information that you just can't get from X-ray crystal structures, and identified two intermediate states that no one had ever known of before.

Though I actually may have believed that I had invented the idea that NMR and computational dynamics are to X-ray crystallography what film reels are to polaroid snapshots (first way back here), I suspect that may not be the case, and now that it's been used by someone else on the cover of this month's Nature Chemical Biology, I know it's time to retire the analogy, at least for my purposes.