
Manu Prakash’s Foldscope Revolution: A cheap, portable microscope - donohoe
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/through-the-looking-glass-annals-of-science-carolyn-kormann
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riffraff
I would like to buy a dozen foldscopes and give them to friends. Sadly, still
not possible as per their FAQ[0] :(

[0] [http://www.foldscope.com/faqs/](http://www.foldscope.com/faqs/)

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grinalope
Radioshack used to sell a $10 plastic microscope that people hacked webcams
onto. What happened to that? Here's a link to an old tutorial.

[http://www.instructables.com/id/30-minute-USB-
microscope/](http://www.instructables.com/id/30-minute-USB-microscope/)

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sriram_malhar
I am really tired of hearing about this revolution for all this time. When is
it available for purchase? I'll pay $2!

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rdudekul
Here is his TED talk:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_that_folds_like_origami)

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geuis
That site design has some serious issues. They're doing something in the
header area that doesn't respond to swiping. In landscape you can't scroll the
page.

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justifier
i see great value in getting these into the hands of those that require
microscope for their work or research that otherwise may be unable to afford
the cost of or require more portability andor durability than a conventional
microscope

what i wonder is what sort of research or work can be enabled by getting 700nm
resolution microscope into everyone's hands?

can anyone offer a list of developing research: on self, others or the
environment; where a microscope is the barrier to entry

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cdcox
I think this project in particular is not hugely useful, the optics aren't
really up to snuff to do anything other than look at small things with your
eyes, it's pretty tricky to use it, and hard to take a picture with it. (Also
in terms of taking a picture you are zooming the image in with the microscope
lens, then zooming it back out with your cell phone lens)

That being said, this project is important philosophically I think and
projects like it are going to be huge.

The real 'killer scopes' for me would be

1\. 10-15 dollar scope with battery and camera. This is possible as raw camera
chips only require 10x magnification (as opposed to the 100-600x this is
providing) so it's cheap/easy to get better optics. One could imagine a low
cost camera chip attached to a lens like this scope's (but a bit better) and a
rasberry pi zero+battery. A scope like that would let you:

(i) Set up machine learning diagnostics for malaria/other blood borne
pathogens/squamous cells. Right now it takes experts to diagnose most of these
diseases and those experts need good scopes. If you had thousands of these
scopes in the wild and took millions of images+diagnoses, you could really
fire some high powered machine learning at it to get rapid, easy diagnoses.
Presumably, if you had good automated diagnostic systems (kind of pie in the
sky) you could also use this for epidemiology.

(ii) Sample monitoring for any kind of growth system. One could imagine a
floating version of this that takes images every few minutes and keeps a count
of the number of cells growing in a medium (in it's FOV), the number/type of
plankton/bacteria it could see, crystal formation etc. Basically any time a
researcher wants to passively monitor a process, a cheap scope like this could
be useful. You could even pair a pump or something to pull in and trap your
sample as needed.

(iii) Water supply testing (for microbes). It's possible you could use a
system like this to take a quick sample of any water supple to decide if it's
potable. With a lot of people doing this you could monitor water supplies much
more effectively.

2\. A 30-50 dollar fluorescent microscope with camera. This is being worked on
by several neuroscience labs. It's around 100-1000 dollars depending on who
you believe. This could be used for:

(i) Long term monitoring of cell firing in animal brains.

(ii) Monitoring chemi or bioflurescenct samples in vivo long term. Could be
used for levels of compounds, disease progression, drug penetration and life
time.

Basically this is stuff people are doing it would just make it much much
cheaper and much more portable allowing longer term, higher throughput
experiments.

Cheap scopes are everywhere, there are a number of decent ones you can buy and
hook to your standard smartphone (though most are weak because as I said
before, they basically have to 'fix' your smartphone's lens). You could even
make a 10 dollar USB scope yourself by cracking open a webcam and flipping its
optics. But mass produced, optically good scopes with cell level resolution in
everyone's hands (especially if they can easily capture those images) have the
potential to make huge, really powerful databases of microscopy data. Right
now computer vision in microscopy is horribly task focused, it would be cool
to see what people could do with billions of diverse microscopy images.

