Blue ribbon

This extraordinary thing is a representation of chlorophyl A protein. It's even trippier when you rotate it, which you can do here, by clicking and moving your cursor across the image. For instance you might see and still not know that the molecule is actually made up of two non-touching ribbons. On the website, make sure to press the links for the alpha-helix and beta-sheet, which show what these ribbons represent. And keep scrolling down...

We arrived at proteins today in Chemistry of Life - all it took was a refresher on amino acids, and a polite introduction to peptide bonds! These very complicated things make so much more sense when you can see three-dimensional representations that I can't imagine how anyone could have taught or understood - let alone discovered - all this without them.

There is a brazen beauty about these complicated chains, which turns to liquid wonder when you realize that they exist in billions of iterations... and make up everything which has life.

Here's another example, among whose wonders are these three representations of the enzyme amylase.