
Stanford bioengineer develops a 50-cent paper microscope - ph0rque
http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2014/03/10/stanford-bioengineer-develops-a-50-cent-paper-microscope/
======
jnbiche
This is an incredibly exciting project -- congrats to the Prakash lab. One of
the most exciting advances in global health and science education I've seen in
a long time.

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...](http://techfinder.stanford.edu/technology_detail.php?ID=29223)

Edit: Is the CAD file public?

~~~
delinquentme
I was asking myself JUST this as I've got a printer lined up :D

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HCIdivision17
The laser cutting surprised me. I know it's almost certainly just for
prototyping, but I couldn't help but think that a full scale industrial
process could drive costs far lower. I would love to work on the line trying
to produce a quarter million a day per line. Ram a ribbon of that paper
between an anvil roll and a pattern cutter, with another line rounding and
polishing ball bearing lenses.

I hope it takes off - these sorts of cheap tech solutions will bootstrap the
rest of the world faster than anything else!

~~~
tedsanders
Yeah, their plan is to use a die cutter for mass production of the paper
parts. The glass beads used as lenses are already mass produced for other
applications.

Source: I've worked with them on an educational pilot of foldscope.

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boothead
If there somewhere I can acquire some of these? I'd absolutely love to get
them into the hands of my daughter and her classmates!

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partoutok
Yes. From one of the comment:

> 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/](http://www.foldscope.com/contact-us/)

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mhb
Why is this impressive? It's not made out of paper. I see plastic lenses, LEDs
and batteries. I can buy a microscope on eBay for less than $2
([http://www.ebay.com/bhp/pocket-microscope](http://www.ebay.com/bhp/pocket-
microscope)). Why is it better for the housing to be made out of paper than
plastic?

Here's my 2 cent microscope "made out of water":
[http://citizenscientistsleague.com/2013/08/29/the-instant-
mi...](http://citizenscientistsleague.com/2013/08/29/the-instant-microscope-
just-add-water/)

~~~
jnbiche
The pocket microscopes you linked to provide 60x magnification. Imaging of
most microbial infections that can be diagnosed visually requires at least
1000x magnification.

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.

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Groxx
That's one of the better "we made a thing" videos I've seen in a long time.
Major props to the video team and Manu Prakash, that was excellent.

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.

~~~
tedsanders
I agree that these are great for teaching kids science, but there are a few
hurdles. First, kids don't really know what makes a good slide - they'll take
opaque things like a orange peel and hope to see something (you can only see
transparent or semi-transparent stuff). Second, it takes a fair bit of
attention to learn how to hold it up to your eye and move the focusing stage
around. Third, it's hard for a young kid to build one of these without
supervision, and if you're a teacher in a 30-kid classroom, you can't
supervise kids individually. None of these problems are insurmountable, but
they do prevent Foldscope from being an instant educational hit.

~~~
boothead
If you can drop a bunch of tablets in a village and kids can get themselves up
to speed with no supervision, I sure that these problems are insurmountable
:-)

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!

[http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian_kids.php](http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian_kids.php)

~~~
thefreeman
just an FYI, but judging from the context of your comment I think you may mean
"surmountable". Insurmountable means they cannot be overcome.

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.

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jessedhillon
Kind of wary about putting a sample of Malaria-infected fluid up to my face
like that. But mostly I'm jealous that nothing I'm working on stands to have a
tenth the impact this could make.

~~~
pja
If it's under a microscope slide cover then you're pretty safe - the fluid is
sandwiched between the slide & the cover and isn't going to go anywhere.

(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.)

~~~
jnbiche
Plus, malaria isn't transmitted via fecal-oral or respiratory route, so
holding it up to your face isn't terribly risky. Taking the sample is much
more risky, since there are sharps involved.

Now, if it were cholera...

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quarterwave
How does the microscope cost compare with paying the technician who will do
the diagnosis? Assuming even $1000 per tech - which is roughly the per capita
GDP(nom) of many countries - in this case maybe it's just better to buy the
scopes in volume from Alibaba?

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?

~~~
eru
The more expensive microscope will be good enough when you already know what
application you have in mind. The almost free microscope let's you explore
without risk.

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frozenport
This is a hole. You can do the same thing with a coke cap and a bright light.
Also notice that the work wasn't published in a scientific journal.

As somebody who works in optics this is the most infuriating thing I have seen
in a while.

ITS A BLOODY HOLE.

~~~
tedsanders
It's not just a hole. There is a ball lens that provides 140x magnification.
The lens can be translated in the x, y, and z directions. To me, that's
deFinitely a microscope.

Why are you so infuriated?

~~~
mhb
He's infuriated because, despite the hype, the TED talk and the Gates funding,
it's not clear why this is better than other simple microscopes which can be
made for even less money. Also, why does it need to be so cheap? Not everyone
in a poor community needs one of these. Surely they could buy/receive a more
conventional instrument and share it.

~~~
tedsanders
"other simple microscopes that can be made for even less money"

What microscopes are cheaper? It seems incredibly hard to beat this on price
without sacrificing a lot of magnification or durability.

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mhb
By trading off field of view, eye relief, brightness and aberrations you can
get any arbitrary magnification by sticking in a different sized plastic ball
lens. Just like all the 500x junk telescopes that are sold.

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.

~~~
tedsanders
The paper vs plastic issue is unimportant, in my opinion. In fact, the latest
designs I've seen are made of polypropylene sheets instead of paper sheets.

I think the critical element is that it's cheap to build and ship.

Again, what microscopes do you know of that are cheaper?

~~~
frozenport
I do like one thing, this has the potential to inspire kids about optics. I
sure would have loved to have one growing up!

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://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/PLDH_Malaria_Antibodies.jpg)
[http://www.csinnovation.com.sg/upload_files/8/Anti_Malaria_H...](http://www.csinnovation.com.sg/upload_files/8/Anti_Malaria_Home_Rapid_Tes.jpg)

tldr: We knew you could do this hundreds of years ago, it won't change the
world because it didn't then.

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gourneau
This is awesome, I want one.

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](http://j.mp/usbmicroscope), it is UVC compliant
and works on Ubuntu/OS X/Windows as a web cam.

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minikomi
Amazing. This talk is also very good for more depth
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoP5MdpMBc4&feature=share&lis...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoP5MdpMBc4&feature=share&list=PLkCqtkRNkFgA6MRBj1VT7myATRZJIk0vJ&index=8)

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avivo
I'm really excited that this is now public! Congrats to Manu, Jim, et al.

FYI, a paper with technical details is available here:
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.1211.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.1211.pdf)

~~~
agumonkey
I skimmed through and it seems dedicated to the optical side of foldscope,
while I was very curious on how they achieved micrometer precision, IIUC of
lens parameters (position, focus) through folding ...

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teddyh
…but apparently nobody can actually _get_ the thing unless they are chosen as
one of 10.000 beta testers. And who knows what the actual license will be on
the designs, if they are ever released.

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xmonkee
What is the component providing the actual magnification?

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Cogito
The article mentioned spherical lenses produced as a by product of an
industrial process:

 _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_

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lifeisstillgood
For me this is linked to the 19bn for WhatsApp. We only spend stupid amounts
on IM apps when we think there is nothing else left to spend money on.

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.

~~~
pja
This is pretty much Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's original microscope design
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leeuwenhoek_Microscope.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leeuwenhoek_Microscope.png)
) using modern materials. So in that sense, it has already been invented!

Which doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile & important of course: the
reapplication of old technologies can lead to great things.

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omegamu
Interesting, I like how they call it "Microscopy." Kind of a throw back to
those old pin-needle hole microscopes.

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plaes
Anyone know where I could find schematics? I would like to do it with kids in
our summer tech camp.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
[http://www.foldscope.com/](http://www.foldscope.com/) has some info about the
project, but you can also signup for their beta program. re: > _To signup,
please send an email to signup@foldscope.com with description of community you
are involved with or one question you would like to tackle. See categories
below for details._ @
[http://www.foldscope.com/#/10ksignup/](http://www.foldscope.com/#/10ksignup/)

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midas007
Earlier prototypes:

[https://pictures.lytro.com/barry.allard/albums/47077](https://pictures.lytro.com/barry.allard/albums/47077)

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agumonkey
50cts microscopes pictures taken by 300$ lytro lenses. Funny.

~~~
midas007
\o/

Someone finally gets a 2 year old joke.

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turnip1979
1) This is wicked cool.

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.

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psc55
Sounds too good to be true. I'll believe it when I can buy/build it. Until
then it's vapourware, period.

~~~
tedsanders
It's not vaporware. I've built them myself. Why make such a critical and
cynical comment? I ask sincerely and not judgmentally. What value does it
offer other readers?

~~~
kefka
We in the tech community deal with "X made! Follow us for commercial
release"...

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.

