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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.
Also a recent TED talk on the topic
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
1. It will never work.
2. Big fuckin deal. Made one myself over breakfast last week.
3. Biology is a worthless major.
4. At least 68 replies starting with the word "Actually"
5. This is proof there's no God.
6. Shut up teabagger
7. Fuck beta
8. I'm competing to be the world's biggest talking penis
9. Four PhDs? No wonder you're a dumbfuck
10. Someone dropped a bulldozer on your car? The problem is you.
The one shown in the video uses pinhole projection.
If you read the article (I know, I know) you'll learn that he uses industrial grit, also known as glass beads, which are tiny bits of glass that are reasonably spherical and ridiculously cheap. The quoted lens cost in the article is $0.17, but unless I'm misunderstanding something, like how special the grit is that he's using, or what kind of secondary selection process is required to pick out beads that will make good lenses, that should be closer to 0.17 cents, not 0.17 dollars.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
They have a website devoted to this:
http://www.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/
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?
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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)
FTFY.
“I wanted to make the best possible disease-detection instrument that we could almost distribute for free,”
And without any doubt.
Unless "3rd world" countries spend 50 cents to create a new one each time, those diseases will be distributed for free.
If you read the article (I know, I know) you'll learn that he uses industrial grit
I think the questions on every Slashdotter's mind now are:
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I had to do far too much wandering about to find a simple image of the thing as it is to be used. Hope this helps someone: http://imgur.com/RzvY6nf