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Tuesday 11 March 2014

Stanford bioengineer develops a 50-cent paper microscope | Scope Blog

In Stanford Medicine Scope Blog

When Manu Prakash, PhD, wants to impress lab visitors with the durability of his Origami-based paper microscope, he throws it off a three-story balcony, stomps on it with his foot and dunks it into a water-filled beaker. Miraculously, it still works.

Even more amazing is that this microscope — a bookmark-sized piece of layered cardstock with a micro-lens — only costs about 50 cents in materials to make.
In the video below, you can see his “Foldscope” being built in just a few minutes, then used to project giant images of plant tissue on the wall of a dark room.
Prakash’s dream is that this ultra-low-cost microscope will someday be distributed widely to detect dangerous blood-borne diseases like malaria, African sleeping sickness, schistosomiasis and Chagas.
The Foldscope is a fully functional microscope that can be laser- or die-cut out of paper for around 50 cents. 

This bookmark-sized microscope can be assembled in minutes, includes no mechanical moving parts, packs in a flat configuration, is extremely rugged and can be incinerated after to safely dispose of infectious biological samples. With minor optics modifications, the microscope can be designed for brightfield, multi-flourescence or projection microscopy, or specialized to identify specific pathogens.

More information: http://stan.md/1dIp5qY,http://www.stanford.edu/~manup/

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