Stanford bioengineer develops a 50-cent paper microscope
scopeblog.stanford.edu
scopeblog.stanford.edu
Given where some of their funding is from (Gates Foundation, NIH Fogarty Institute Global Health Equity Scholars (GHES) Fellowship, other global health foundations), I really hope they open source this design under an appropriate open source license. The benefits to the developing world of having this design available to the public under an open source license are tremendous.
The only details I can find for licensing don't look too promising (hopefully I'm wrong): http://techfinder.stanford.edu/technology_detail.php?ID=2922...
Edit: Is the CAD file public?
I hope it takes off - these sorts of cheap tech solutions will bootstrap the rest of the world faster than anything else!
Source: I've worked with them on an educational pilot of foldscope.
> To sign up for the “10,000 Microscope Project” where Prakash will give away 10,000 build-your-own-Foldscope kits to 10,000 people who pledge to share their experiences and experiments on his website, go here: http://www.foldscope.com/contact-us/
Here's my 2 cent microscope "made out of water": http://citizenscientistsleague.com/2013/08/29/the-instant-mi...
The Foldscope project provides over 2000x magnification.
Also, the 50-cent cost is right now. They hope to get the cost down significantly lower by scaling up production.
Finally, it doesn't hurt that the Foldscope is significantly more rugged than a plastic microscope. You could easily stack a thousand of them in a small pack and bring them to some remote region on foot, horse, or motorcycle.
And the thing is cool, bordering on "coolest thing in a long time". This would also be phenomenal for use in schools, especially with younger kids. I really really want to see lots of these built and sold and in everyone's hands.
I didn't have to build my microscope at school but it was still educational to have access to one. This is primarily for kids that don't have what we had. (At least from an educational perspective - the medical perspective is arguably more important.)
The more I read about learning, the more I think structure, testing and to a lesser extent supervision are detrimental to younger kids. My little girl brings home weekly spelling tests at the age of 5, I'd much rather give her things like this, a minimal amount of instruction and let her loose!
I have to totally agree with you about learning though. I went to a Montessori school for much of my youth and really attribute my love for learning to it.
The day is divided into blocks, and the classroom is divided into sections of activities related to subjects. The child has to do a certain number of activities for each subject each week, but they get to choose when and what they did.
If a kid builds a microscope, takes orange peel, and recognises that they don't see anything because it's opaque, that's great - it's frustrating but they learned something.
As a child, we weren't allowed to mess around with the microscopes because they were too expensive. But messing around with microscopes is exactly what kids should be doing.
* fourth graders are still developing their fine motor skills and not all will be physically capable of construction-type work.
* fourth graders don't really have enough science background to understand why they should be interested in microscopes (let's say, they would learn more playing with a 2-10x magnifying glass)
* as you identify, fourth graders have short attention spans which are still developing. If you're teaching, you have a responsibility to manage this.
If you were going to demo to a seventh grade class, I would warn you of the same issues, honestly. On the other hand, I would be very excited to have you in any classroom eighth grade and above.
(You don't normally try and image free standing droplets that could run off for a couple of reasons: Except for the clearest liquids they'd be too optically thick to see anything useful and you'd have problems focusing on objects that can move in the z direction as well as laterally with respect to the lens.)
Now, if it were cholera...
So the real value of the 50-center may be for people to make their own samples, and use a local shop to upload a cell phone picture to an online analysis service. Running on the cloud, maybe?
As somebody who works in optics this is the most infuriating thing I have seen in a while.
ITS A BLOODY HOLE.
Why are you so infuriated?
What microscopes are cheaper? It seems incredibly hard to beat this on price without sacrificing a lot of magnification or durability.
Given all the attention this is getting, I have to conclude that I'm missing a critical element of what makes this notable. I get that it's very cheap and can be stepped on, but maybe you can explain the application for this that wouldn't be better served by the shared use of a more conventional design made out of plastic instead of paper and which could still survive rough handling.
I think the critical element is that it's cheap to build and ship.
Again, what microscopes do you know of that are cheaper?
These point of care services aren't limit by the cost of the microscope, they are limited by staff and the cost of histology. Most of the scopes I see at the clinic are cheap brightfield ones used to look at stained specimens, and are kept as backups when the Beckman-Colter machine fails. Can your microscope distinguish white blood cell morphology? Working with live cell imaging you learn that red-blood cells are evil because they carry no detail and little information, they are trivial to see and deconvolve. You can see relevant features even if you are beyond the diffraction limit, but then again you need those fancy slides that spread the cells out so that you can inspect them one-by-one.
I see no new science and an attempt to address non-existent problems and seems way out of touch with the needs of medical staff. The test for malaria looks something like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/PLDH_Mala... http://www.csinnovation.com.sg/upload_files/8/Anti_Malaria_H...
tldr: We knew you could do this hundreds of years ago, it won't change the world because it didn't then.
"Although it costs less than a dollar in parts (see Bill of Materials in table 1), it can provide over 2,000X magnification with submicron resolution, weighs less than two nickels (8.8 g), is small enough to fit in a pocket (70 × 20 × 2 mm3), requires no external power, and can survive being dropped from a 3-story building or stepped on by a person (see figure 1G and supplementary video 2)."
Until then, for folks that can afford there are some really great ~$50 usb microscope web cams. I have this one http://j.mp/usbmicroscope, it is UVC compliant and works on Ubuntu/OS X/Windows as a web cam.
FYI, a paper with technical details is available here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.1211.pdf
The poppy-seed-sized lenses where[sic] originally mass produced in various sizes as an abrasive grit that was thrown into industrial tumblers to knock the rough edges off metal parts
> One of the unique design features of the microscope is the use of inexpensive spherical lenses rather than the precision-ground curved glass lenses used in traditional microscopes. These poppy-seed-sized lenses where originally mass produced in various sizes as an abrasive grit that was thrown into industrial tumblers to knock the rough edges off metal parts. In the simplest configuration of the Foldscope, one 17-cent lens is press-fit into a small hole in the center of the slide-mounting platform. Some of his more sophisticated versions use multiple lenses and filters.
Its similar to the USPO comment at the end of the 19C - "Everything that can be invented has been invented". With that attitude you will sink your billions into anything - but this shows there is always scope (#) for invention and innovation.
(#) See what I did there.
Which doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile & important of course: the reapplication of old technologies can lead to great things.
Someone finally gets a 2 year old joke.
2) The feat itself is impressive. Sucks they have to "sell" it with the malaria application. I guess science has almost always been like that.
And that day never comes for many projects. So yes, skepticism is warranted in the sciences. And frankly, until I can buy one or download the CAD drawings, it effectively does not exist.
I have designed, cut, and built foldscopes, and I can confirm that they work incredibly well and are cheap and quick to make. (I knew the professor involved from my time at MIT, and worked with the group on alternate designs, as I had some previous background in folding of various sorts.)
Anyhow, crazy awesome clinical, education and novelty value. There are plenty of situations where donating lab equipment is as cruel as giving someone a white elephant, but this is the polar opposite.
The cost is mostly in the bead. The tricky part is holding it a precision distance from the focusing plane, which the paper contraption accomplishes (clearly it's been simplified). The other neat aspect of the prototypes was that one part can be sanded down more on one side than another, where sliding a part allow very fine focus.