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Science Technology

Paper Microscope Magnifies Objects 2100 Times and Costs Less Than $1 89

Posted by Soulskill from the i-can-see-my-house-from-here dept.
ananyo writes: "If ever a technology were ripe for disruption, it is the microscope. Microscopes are expensive and need to be serviced and maintained. Unfortunately, one important use of them is in poor-world laboratories and clinics, for identifying pathogens, and such places often have small budgets and lack suitably trained technicians. Now Manu Prakash, a bioengineer at Stanford University, has designed a microscope made almost entirely of paper, which is so cheap that the question of servicing it goes out of the window. Individual Foldscopes are printed on A4 sheets of paper (ideally polymer-coated for durability). A pattern of perforations on the sheet marks out the 'scope's components, which are colour-coded in a way intended to assist the user in the task of assembly. The Foldscope's non-paper components, a poppy-seed-sized spherical lens made of borosilicate or corundum, a light-emitting diode (LED), a watch battery, a switch and some copper tape to complete the electrical circuit, are pressed into or bonded onto the paper. (The lenses are actually bits of abrasive grit intended to roll around in tumblers that smooth-off metal parts.) A high-resolution version of this costs less than a dollar, and offers a magnification of up to 2,100 times and a resolving power of less than a micron. A lower-spec version (up to 400x magnification) costs less than 60 cents."
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Paper Microscope Magnifies Objects 2100 Times and Costs Less Than $1 More

Paper Microscope Magnifies Objects 2100 Times and Costs Less Than $1

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  • dupe (Score:5, Informative)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:04PM (#46759147) Homepage Journal

    this is of-course a dupe [slashdot.org], but hey, what else is new.

    Ted talk on this device. [ted.com]

  • dupe (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:07PM (#46759189)
    I think we've seen this one before: http://science.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]

  • 2012 news (Score:1)

    by oxygen_deprived ( 1127583 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:09PM (#46759223)
    This was a ted talk 2 YEARS ago. Wake up slash editors...

    • Re:2012 news (Score:2)

      by siddesu ( 698447 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:29PM (#46759455)
      I still want to know if you can see anything at all at 2k magnification. High magnification is easy. Good images at high magnification is what matters in a microscope.

      • Re:2012 news (Score:3, Informative)

        by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:49PM (#46759659) Homepage

        and a resolving power of less than a micron.

        Around 1/100th of the width of a human hair.

        • Re:2012 news (Score:2)

          by NatasRevol ( 731260 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:59PM (#46759767) Journal

          That doesn't answer siddesu's question at all.

          • Re:2012 news (Score:2)

            by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @06:17PM (#46761727) Homepage

            Well, he didn't strictly ask a question, but that aside:

            I still want to know if you can see anything at all at 2k magnification.

            The answer is: yes, you can see things that are 1/100th the width of a human hair.

            • Re:2012 news (Score:2)

              by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @08:56AM (#46766289) Homepage Journal

              That still doesn't answer his question.

              Yes, you can see that there is a thing that is 1/100th the width of a hair. Can you see what it is? Can you distinguish it from other similarly sized things in close proximity?

              • Re:2012 news (Score:2)

                by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @04:05PM (#46772703) Homepage

                That still doesn't answer his question.

                And he still didn't ask a question. Pedantry aside, I've answered his "question" perfectly well, which was "[Can you] see anything at all at 2k magnification[?]" It's actually a pretty vague and pointless question, when you think about it. The answer is either yes, you can see something, or no, you can't see anything.

                For some reason everyone's decided that he was actually asking a far more involved question with all kinds of additional parameters which are being sprung from nowhere.

                Can you see what it is?

                That depends what it is. Being able to see an object doesn't imply that you can identify it.

                Can you distinguish it from other similarly sized things in close proximity?

                That is more-or-less the practical definition of "resolving power."

                • Re:2012 news (Score:0)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @05:18PM (#46773683)

                  For some reason everyone's decided that he was actually asking a far more involved question with all kinds of additional parameters which are being sprung from nowhere.

                  Maybe that is because it looks like a question many of us with microscopy experience would ask, implying all the baggage you disregarded. Even really nice microscopes that can be configured for 1000-2000x magnification can sometimes produce crap images that are vary from barely usable to useless. It isn't just about the magnification that makes a microscope useful, and not even about the resolving power either, but ofter factors like field of view and stuff that effect how bright the image is with a reasonable light source. It is the same as anyone with some working telescope experience seeing one of those cheap telescopes in a department store that have some large magnification number as their only selling point on the box. They'll ask, "But what can you actually see with it?" and anyone else familiar with how incomplete of a story the magnification number gives for a telescope will know they are not asking how big things would be in an ideal scope with that magnification.

                  Some of this is kind of moot, because if being used for some sort of pass-fail testing, you can have pretty bad images and still get what you need, while some other tests could be done with a lot of training. But other tests would be tedious if the field of view and illumination sucks, and it would be difficult to use to train or teach. Unfortunately, in education settings is where people are most typically trying to get cheap as possible, and providers are more than willing to slap on lenses labeled with high magnifications, but in actuality are literally incapable of seeing anything because the optics and design are so bad.

  • Holy Awesome Batman! (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:09PM (#46759225)

    I have never, nor will I ever, accomplish something as awesome as this.

    I feel inadequate now.

  • Overpriced at $0.60 (Score:2, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:13PM (#46759263) Homepage

    For only $0.50, you can get this nicer toy microscope [alibaba.com] on Alibaba. People have been making microscopes from drops of water [slashdot.org] or glass beads since Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope. With tiny optics, the view is dim, but it works.

  • Making a Difference (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eastjesus ( 3182503 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:21PM (#46759339)
    Back around 1985 I worked with a teacher in a grade school with a lot of low income students creating a microscope that the kids could build and use out of trash quickly. We used a cardboard box that used to hold wooden matches and cut a flap in the wide sides so light could illuminate the inside and covered one end with aluminum foil. Other boxes could also be used but the slide made it easy to focus. A small hole was punched in the center of the foil. The object to be examined was placed inside on top of the part of the box that slid in and out (which was now exposed to light) and a drop of water put in the hole in the foil. It worked remarkably well and the kids had a great time with it looking at all sorts of things inside and outdoors but maybe the greatest thing was that the kids started thinking about how things worked and coming up with novel solutions rather than just buying something to do the job.

  • I know (Score:-1)

    by The Cat ( 19816 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:22PM (#46759361)

    Why don't you have them manufactured by robots, then you can put the rest of the microscope business on the street too?

  • less than a micron? (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:24PM (#46759389)

    Yeah, sure, who remembers Shannon nowadays?

  • Why lie about it being made of paper? (Score:0, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:32PM (#46759479)

    It contains many components that are not paper. This is Republican level of untruth here. /. has completely given in to their rule. It's sad to see this site destroyed by CONservatives.

    PS: Why is the login broken for the Beta again? It is a disaster.

    • Re:Why lie about it being made of paper? (Score:3, Informative)

      by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:53PM (#46759701)
      The Economist is a Conservative publication??? You have an interesting perspective on the world.

      • Re:Why lie about it being made of paper? (Score:-1)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @03:03PM (#46759817)

        They don't support a reasonable basic income. That makes them pretty damn racist and right winger. They don't support having wealthy people pay their fair share for the people that can't afford to live on their own. Their "let the poor and minorities starve" position is as right wing as you can get. They are run and ruled by CONservatives.

      • Re:Why lie about it being made of paper? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @03:37PM (#46760161)

        >The Economist is a Conservative publication??? You have an interesting perspective on the world.

        Umm, yeah. Is this news to you? Certainly outside the U.S. it is considerate somewhat conservative.

        For example, over the last 60 years it has almost always endorsed the Conservative party in the general election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance#Endorsements)

        • Re:Why lie about it being made of paper? (Score:2)

          by painandgreed ( 692585 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @01:27PM (#46770399)

          >The Economist is a Conservative publication??? You have an interesting perspective on the world.

          Umm, yeah. Is this news to you? Certainly outside the U.S. it is considerate somewhat conservative.

          For example, over the last 60 years it has almost always endorsed the Conservative party in the general election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance#Endorsements)

          Yep, but in the States, people like my Republican father find it a bit too liberal for his tastes. He still reads it because it has good information, but he can't see how they could endorse Obama in the last election (which they did), but there are other issues besides economics going on there. Of course, Obama is considered a solid conservative to most outside the US apparently.

      • Re:Why lie about it being made of paper? (Score:0)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @04:30PM (#46760675)

        By current neocon/libertarian standards Reagan was a spend-thrift liberal.

  • Link to the paper (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:33PM (#46759497)

    The website is a bit thin on detail. Here's their paper from the FAQ

    http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1403/1403.1211.pdf

  • Hacks (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:34PM (#46759511)

    At that cost, you could have a drawer full of them. Whip it out of your pocket and see if that fork you're about to shove in a pile of spaghetti is actually a festering spike of salmonella.
    It is literally 200 times cheaper than an equal performance educational microscope.

    Clearly someone found the real life cheat menu.

    • Re:Hacks (Score:2)

      by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @03:27PM (#46760055)

      It is literally 200 times cheaper than an equal performance educational microscope.

      That educational microscope is designed to last 200 times as long and be 200 times more versatile.

      • Re:Hacks (Score:3)

        by kesuki ( 321456 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @04:10PM (#46760487) Journal

        the paper microscope is easy to incinerate, and i doubt the have autoclaves to sterilize the 'same magnification' in a educational microscope. the thing can be printed on almost any printer with a few parts (battery) that shouldn't be incinerated and are not printable yet.
        to use all you do is go into a shaded room insert a slide and see everything on a tabletop below the device. they can then have a list of pathogen shots pre printed and bundled with the microscope, at least the website has the photos so including common pathogens adds little to the cost. in africa you don't need education to be a doctor. you show up and do what you can. a quality microscope that doesn't come with shots of known pathogens is unlikely to exist in many parts of africa. while a $1 paper projection microscope doesn't seem like it is great, it is something that can really help people.

    • Re:Hacks (Score:2)

      by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @09:02AM (#46766359) Homepage Journal

      see if that fork ... is actually a festering spike of salmonella.

      Good luck with that...

  • ...on a smartphone! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by VortexCortex ( 1117377 ) <VortexCortex AT ... trograde DOT com> on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:36PM (#46759523)

    Great. Now, what I want you to do is make it origami onto the cameras everyone is toting around and connect it to an image recognition library / service. Blam. Instant bug detection. Not so sure about the diag? Snap the shot, post it online / send it off and have some pros ID the doodads. Also, video. Microscopic Vine Compilation Videos. I can hear the semen commentary now.

  • Microscope made out of paper... (Score:4, Informative)

    by bradgoodman ( 964302 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:47PM (#46759627) Homepage
    ....and a poppy-seed-sized spherical lens made of borosilicate or corundum... ...and a light-emitting diode (LED), ...and a watch battery, ...and a switch ...and some copper tape)

  • Make slashdot out of paper! (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:52PM (#46759691)

    Better then beta!

  • No, this is not what the developing world needs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nietsch ( 112711 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @03:09PM (#46759883) Homepage Journal

    This is what some uni group thought up to score some charity points with. "look we made an scientific instrument that almost everyone can recognise but almost no-one knows how to use, and made a very cheap & crappy version of it. And since it is cheap, it is good for the poor".
    No thanks. Cheap microscopes have been around for ages, probably because some parents think it will help their kid become a smart scientist later in life. None of these are used in the developing world for medical diagnosis, because there is no need for it. Sending millions of these overseas will help almost no-one.
    Having access to a microscope does not make you a doctor nor will that allow you to make a reliable diagnosis. You need training for that, and that training is way more expensive than the microscope or other tools you will use. And training/people to train is something that is lacking, not microscopes.
    Presenting a technical solution to this social problem will give them praise 'for the good work they do for the poor' but in reality they could have danced raindances in the poor's name to the same effect.

    • Re:No, this is not what the developing world needs (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Puff_Of_Hot_Air ( 995689 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @03:24PM (#46760023)
      The whole point of this, the whole point, is to make specialized idiot-proof diagnostic tools. Did you watch the Ted talk? It's short and informative. If you see the vid, you'll see that many of these places have a fancy microscope already that no one can use. With this thing they can create a specialized single use malaria detector for example. Very little training is required to insert slide, look at image, malaria? Yes/No. That's the point of this, that's what they are trying to achieve. It's a good idea, and it could transform diagnosis in the third world.

    • Re:No, this is not what the developing world needs (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @03:33PM (#46760125)

      Yep.

      Apart from that: There is something called "empty magnification" in microscopy when magnification is increased but no further increase in resolution is obtained. This means you see everything larger as opposed to more detail, i.e. a blurry blob representing the nucleus of a cell just gets larger instead of being visualized in greater detail, being able to see chromatin deposits or the nucleolus. As far as I can remember, obtaining useful magnification into the 1000s requires special condensers, oil immersion, coverslips manufactured to tight tolerances and well set-up Köhler illumination.

      And for optical diagnosis of most pathogens, microscopy is just the last step in a whole chain. You'll also need the glassware, reagents, incubators, autoclaves, trained personnel...

    • MOOCs provide free education. Give each child a laptop, or something like that, and they can learn how to use the microscope. Or they can play with it and learn on their own, which is better than not having one, right?

    • Training does not make one a doctor, either. There are tens of thousands of incompetent quacks in the Third World with medical certificates whose diagnoses are less trustworthy than the old lady who sells herbs in the market, and the quack charges prices that the poor can't afford. If the old lady's granddaughter can use this tool and a printed page with sketches of different microorganisms then the poor have a better chance of getting the help they need.

      BTW, the training does not have to be expensive. Cuba and Venezuela both sponsor medical professional training (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) for free, as long as the student is willing to spend their first x-many years after graduation (5 years, I think) working in under-served areas of their countries.

  • If you go to the University of Washington website and check today's news, you'll see a UW scientist developed an app so you can use your cell phone as a microscope.

    It's an app.

    You don't have to kill trees.

  • Why a watch battery? (Score:2)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @03:42PM (#46760213)

    Use a penlite instead with much more capacity for 1/20 the price.

  • and yet where is it? (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @04:02PM (#46760415)

    This was originally announced in 2012. I have 50 cents in my pocket. WHERE CAN I GET ONE? I can't? Oh then STFU.

  • This again? (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @04:03PM (#46760423)

    Yawn.

  • This would be a lot more fun... (Score:2)

    by drdread66 ( 1063396 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @04:28PM (#46760653)

    ...if they open-sourced the design or at least just let me download a PDF so I could print one and make it at home. As the FAQ says, however, "Foldscope is not yet commercially available."

    This, of course, makes me wonder why this needs to be commercial at all...

  • Bull (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @05:01PM (#46760941)

    It doesn't exist until I can buy one.

  • Real cost (Score:2)

    by grumpyman ( 849537 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @05:02PM (#46760943)
    Come on... how much is a chip anyway, just a few grains of sand?

  • What the fuck is "poor-world"? (Score:-1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @05:14PM (#46761059)

    Oh, you mean THIRD world, those hellholes where sub-70 IQ savages live, who are, of course, 'just the same as us', because the Jew television said so. Have I summed it up adequately enough?
    The fundamental question is - WHY is the third world the third world? Is it because of the LAND MASS that the people live on, that somehow makes them less intelligent than white people, and unable to wipe their own asses? Is it because of the WEATHER? No, it's because of their GENES, and everybody knows it.

    So why are we all lying about this?

  • why not injection molding (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @05:35PM (#46761269)

    I find it hard to believe that one couldn't stamp out high precision injection molded plastic to which you would add the same components and have a better microscope. How precisely can you print something and then how precisely can you fold it. For microscopes magnifying at x100 or more, mechanical precision and stability is critical. This is something that high quality injection molding is great at. Pick the right plastic with the right fillers and you've got a winner.

    that spherical lens is also going to raise issues. Aberrations are pretty severe. The way the article reads, it would be like rolling a clear marble around a piece of microfiche and trying to read it. Again, high quality aspheric lenses can be made for pennies from plastic. Why not do that, glue it into that injection molded plastic housing, and be done with it.

    The problem here isn't getting microscopes into the hands of "poor disease ridden Africans". If microscopes cost $100 each (and you can make a nice microscope for $100 mfr cost) for $10M, you can get 100,000 of them, which is enough for practically every village and health aide in Africa. And you could use a mirror and the sun for illumination. (it's not like you need to do your pathology work in the dead of night, and there ARE, already, decent cheap LED lights in Africa)

    The problem is getting people who know how to USE that microscope effectively.

    Or build a cheap addition to a computer that can do computational pathology.. A microscope attachment to a OLPC with suitable image processing software might be a better revolution.

  • The bigger picture (Score:1)

    by Dan Askme ( 2895283 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @07:58AM (#46765811) Homepage

    Lets break this down a little bit:
    + This is a device ideally aimed for third world countries
    + No training/procedures for handling the device
    + They will be reusing the item as much as possible to save on costs, regardless if it says "single use".
    + An item that comes into direct contact with the disease.
    = More spread of diseases.

    Its all well and good inventing the tools for the job.
    But who is going to pay the cost for the training to ensure this device doesn't start a mass epidemic?

  • b-sh-it (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17, 2014 @10:15AM (#46778829)

    Minimum order sum is $75.00 for Swiss Jewel Co. 0.2 mm sapphire ball lens in components list

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