As spotted on Sandra Porter’s never less than interesting blog here’s a wonderful idea to help you understand the science. A website devoted to visualising experiments/publications in video.
Journal of Visualized Experiments
I think you would do the site a great disservice if you described it as Youtube for the bench scientist, but in a way that’s exactly what it is. Except instead of inane comments (who reads Youtube comments?), it’s the publication, with enough information to repeat the protocol. Sometimes when reading a protocol, nevermind the sparse methods and materials of a paper, it’s hard to come to grips with some parts in enough details to do this yourself. Watching somebody do that is surely almost as good as visiting the lab, and surely a lot cheaper!