... everybody has a little trouble comprehending the relative sizes of things that are either very very big, or very very small. To better appreciate the relative sizes of very small things, you can zoom in here (thanks to the Genetics Department at the University of Utah).
Use the scroll bar at bottom to zoom. First you see the embryos of three different plants (coffee, rice, sesame). From this millimeter size range, you can zoom all the way down to a carbon atom (320 picometers in girth). Along the way, see a couple of biggish protozoans, a variety of human cells, and a single human chromosome; then you zoom past a baker's yeast and a bacterium. You see a mitochondrion, which is another sort of bacterium. The "coated vesicle" is what gets pinched in from the plasma membrane during endocytosis; it is about the same size as the HIV virus particle. The smallest virus shown, Rhinovirus, causes the common cold. It does not have a lipid envelope, but is just a package of RNA in a protein coat. It is about the same size as a ribosome.
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