Stanford Bioengineer Develops a 50-cent Paper Microscope 83
An anonymous reader writes "Scope: A Stanford bioengineer has developed an ultra-low-cost print-and-fold microscope and is now showing others how to make one themselves. The 50-cent lightweight, paper 'Foldscope' — which 'can be assembled in minutes, [and] includes no mechanical moving parts' — was designed to aid disease diagnosis in developing regions."
The paper describing the design is on arXiv, and a video demoing the microscope is attached below.
Also a recent TED talk (Score:5, Informative)
Also a recent TED talk on the topic [ted.com]
Not entirely made out of paper, of course. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Lenses too? (Score:5, Informative)
The one shown in the video uses pinhole projection.
http://www.foldscope.com/ (Score:5, Informative)
They have a website devoted to this:
http://www.foldscope.com/ [foldscope.com]
And the news on the web site is that they will give away 10,000 of these to people who volunteer to test them. If you think you could do a good job of testing, maybe you should sign up.
http://www.foldscope.com/#/10ksignup/ [foldscope.com]
To me, the most impressive part is that he claims they have very accurate focusing. I believe he said "micron" focusing. I'm not sure how that works, but the paper is cut to a very accurate shape (the video showed some sort of computer-controlled cutter, it might even have been a laser cutter). By moving a tab I guess the paper can be made to flex predictably to focus the lens?
Re:Why not put them out in schools ? (Score:5, Informative)
but what about the potential benefit in schools ?
The kids do love them. And can assemble them by themselves.
I'm a Stanford PhD student and for an outreach organization Science Bus we actually worked with 2-5th graders locally to each build their own microscope to keep. The Foldscope works well and actually found the projection ability great in the classroom so that multiple students can see the same thing at once.