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Paper Microscope Magnifies Objects 2100 Times and Costs Less Than $1
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."
this is of-course a dupe, but hey, what else is new.
Ted talk on this device.
You can't handle the truth.
I think we've seen this one before: http://science.slashdot.org/st...
This was a ted talk 2 YEARS ago. Wake up slash editors...
I have never, nor will I ever, accomplish something as awesome as this.
I feel inadequate now.
For only $0.50, you can get this nicer toy microscope on Alibaba. People have been making microscopes from drops of water or glass beads since Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope. With tiny optics, the view is dim, but it works.
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.
Yeah, sure, who remembers Shannon nowadays?
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.
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
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.
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.
That link leads to a microscope that looks a cheap piece of crap.
The Foldscope (or whatever it is) looks way easier to store, easier for most people to use, and looks like it would also be substantially brighter. If I were choosing between the two I'd pay 10x the cost of that Alibab scope to get a Foldscope instead.
What is even the magnification on that thing? 0x?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
....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)
Better then beta!
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.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Use a penlite instead with much more capacity for 1/20 the price.
This was originally announced in 2012. I have 50 cents in my pocket. WHERE CAN I GET ONE? I can't? Oh then STFU.
Yawn.
...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...
What is this, the 00's? 3D-printing is how things are made now, grandpa.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
It doesn't exist until I can buy one.
Come on... how much is a chip anyway, just a few grains of sand?
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.
Agreed, unless you don't have one handy. The point was for the kids (they were 2nd grade) to think about stuff around them in new ways. I used to win bar bets when I lived in Wisconsin by claiming to be able to start a fire using the bowl that the peanuts were in and some water. Only worked when it was sunny and freezing outside, though, but it was a good excuse to have another couple of beers.
3D printing is a prototyping technology, not a manufacturing technology. And today's crop of brilliant, low-cost LEDs might help with that dim-field problem cited above.
I used to win bar bets when I lived in Wisconsin by claiming to be able to start a fire using the bowl that the peanuts were in and some water.
depends what the bowl was made of... if it is a fire bowl then yes, i could do that. if it is a wooden or plastic or metal bowl, then no.
I'm working at one of the top tier biotech companies in 1990
lunch, time seminair, the speaker says he was in New Guinea, up in the mountains, at the clinic
sometimes the electricy went out, and the electric autoclave , of course, stopped working
people would put things in the dead autoclave, close the door, wait an hour.
not dumb; just not trained
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?
The bowl was plastic with the inside forming a hemisphere. Fill it with water, take it outside to freeze, have a couple of beers while waiting, then take out a 6" f/1.0 lens made of ice. Focus the sun on a piece of paper or something flammable. It's not the greatest lens for imaging but it will start paper on fire. Water can make interesting optics, both liquid and solid.
But what about the peanuts?
Minimum order $75 for Swiss Jewel Co. 0.2 mm sapphire ball lens
Minimum order sum is $75.00 for Swiss Jewel Co. 0.2 mm sapphire ball lens in components list