I also remember how cool mercury was and how our incautious teacher had let us played with our hands in it, despite its toxicity. If you want to discover more about the micro-universe but you don't want to have the hassle of slides, drops of blood or samples of skins, give VirtualLab a try.

Among the specimens available there are human blood cells, penicillin, pyrite, meteorite, lunar dust, yeast, dog liver and human kidney samples.

Be careful though as some of the files are really big, more than 150MB and it will take ages to download them. This is because the images are really detailed and you can zoom in more than 150,000X.

For some images then, you can also select a portion and have a 3D rendering in another window.

In fact, it is not possible to zoom in freely on an image, as there are just four fixed zoom levels you can choose from.

Firstly, you'll need to make sure that you've got at least Java 1.5 or newer installed as this is an open source java based platform. Once opened, you are presented with the Bioclipse Workbench view which displays molecules in 3D. Next to this you have the editor window where you can work with editing files and perform saves, copy and pastes etc. finally you have the perspective window which is a collection of views and editors such as the Chemoinformatics view which displays information related to chemoinformatics like 2D-editing, 3D-visualization etc.

For anyone involved in molecular science, this is a simple but powerful program that will make your graphical presentations look much more professional.

Download Bioclipse 1.1.3 in Softonic