Stanford Bioengineer Develops a 50-cent Paper Microscope

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.

A tip of the hat to Leeuwenhoek.

[dpbsmith]

This is EXTREMELY cool. But it seems to me they might have given a tip of the hat to Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who developed spherical glass microscope lenses in the late 1600s. Well, I see their paper does: "Although the use of high-curvature miniature lenses traces back to Antony van Leeuwenhoek's seminal discovery of microbial life forms (8), manufacturing micro-lenses in bulk was not possible until recently."

Why not put them out in schools ?

[slincolne]

The developing world chant always gets sympathy, but what about the potential benefit in schools ?

I can remember in school the problem getting accessed (more students than microscopes) and with these schools could give them to students.

Not only are they useful in class, but potentially they might get students interested in looking a the wider world!

It would also potentially drive someone to mass market them - laser cut them in school and fix in the lense (or worst case outsource the manufacturing to China)