Here’s a Kickstarter project that wants to use your smartphone to extend the powers of something else: a basic microscope — allowing for real-time videos of microbes doing weird stuff to be captured on your phone and easily shared to your social networks (if you’re that kind of person). Read More
High quality microscopes cost thousands of dollars and can be hard to operate and maintain. A group of researchers from Stanford University are close to changing that with a microscope that’s made mostly out of paper and costs less than a dollar to make.
The Foldscope was conceptualized by Jim Cybulski, James Clements and Asst. Prof. Manu Prakash. They were moved to develop the revolutionary microscope because they wanted to speed up the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases in developing countries. In his recent TED presentation, Asst. Prof. Prakash said that right now it can take months for patients in developing countries to get diagnosed and treated partly because microscopes are bulky, hard to maintain and expensive to acquire . So they set out to design a microscope that’s portable, easy to operate and can be mass produced at low costs. It looks like they succeeded.
In their paper, Jim, James and Asst. Prof. Prakash. said that the Foldscope can provide a magnification of up to 2,000X depending on the lens used. All of its components can be packed on a single sheet of card stock, which can also serve as an instruction manual. Foldscope is also resistant to impact and water. It’s so small that you can carry multiple Foldscopes in your pocket. The only part of the microscope that needs electricity is an LED, which can last over 50 hours on a button cell battery. Best of all, it only costs between $0.58 to $0.97 to make. Below is Asst. Prof. Prakash’ TED presentation about the Foldscope:
How amazing is that? A copy of Jim, James and Asst. Prof. Prakash’s paper is available from the Cornell University Library archive. If you want to get your hands on one, head to the Foldscope team’s website and apply to become one of the their 10,000 beta testers.
Genes, chromosomes, DNA. We all know it’s complicated, but who knew it could be so beautiful?
Electron microscopist Louise Hughes is passionate about microscopy and the genetic structures that she has studied and observed. And now they are available to wear as jewelry, as Louise has begun a Kickstarter campaign to get these pieces of jewelry in production.
Rewards include postcards featuring Louise’s microscopy artwork (told you she was passionate about it!), rings, pendants, earrings, and cufflinks that are available in XX, XY, XXY, or triplet of chromosome 21 designs. There’s also a ring available that features all of the chromosomes in a single piece.
For more information on the project and the rewards, check out the Human Chromosome Jewelry campaign page on Kickstarter.
[via C|NET]
We can cry because we’re happy. We can cry because we’re sad. We can cry because we’re cutting onions. We can cry just because we need to cry. They’re all completely different emotions… but are they different tears? Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher wanted to find out in her series The Topography of Tears. She put dried tears from all different kinds of situations under the microscope to see what’s different between them all.
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There is no nugget on a chicken. There are breasts, there are wings, there are thighs, there are drumsticks. But there are no nuggets
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We’ve seen ways to turn your iPhone into a DIY microscope before, but they always require buying something kind of exotic, like a ball lens
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A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology, led by Professor Changhuei Yang, have figured out a way to crank their microscopy up to 11. Usually, scientists are forced between a rock and a hard place: they can have high res images of small areas or low resolution pictures of larger fields. Using a strategy known as Fourier ptychographic microscopy, Yang’s team was able to computationally correct a standard microscope’s low res imagery, producing a billion-pixel picture. By adding an LED array to an existing microscope — the only hardware tweak their $200 system calls for — the researchers were able to stitch together a 20X quality image from a 2X optical lens. The information gleaned from the LED lights was corrected entirely on a computer, making it an exceptionally cost effective way to create high res microscopic images. The team’s report, published by the journal Nature Phototonics, can be read in full at the source link below.
Via: California Institute of Technology
Source: Nature Phototonics
Flickr member/Artist/Legologist Carl Merriam loves making functional sculptures out of his favorite medium. Take this microscope for instance. It’s not high tech enough for CSI: Legoland, but it does have a magnifying glass inside and working focus knobs.
Merriam thought of making a microscope when he realized that his X-Pod looked like a Petri dish.
He didn’t provide a detailed breakdown or how-to, but he did say, “I used a planetary gear system to allow both coarse and fine adjustment of the objective “lens”. A little more tinkering and I connected the focus to a magnifying glass and fiber optic light in the eyepiece, so adjusting the focus knobs would actually bring the writing on a LEGO stud in and out of focus.”
I guess this is an Imperial microscope. Check out Merriam’s Flickr page or his blog for more of his builds. And yes, someone’s already built a working LEGO telescope.
[via Doobybrain]
This may look like your last bad trip, but in fact you’re looking at a sample of damaged blood cells which is over 5,000 years old.
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So much of what children are taught in the sciences amounts to abstractions. It’s a shame, really — concepts of the universe are so much easier to extrapolate when we can see them for ourselves. OLPC’s looking to give the classrooms it serves more access to the very big and very small with two new attachments that we had the opportunity to check out on a recent visit to the company’s Miami office. First off is a telescope that secures to the side of its XO-4 laptop with a vice grip, utilizing the device’s built-in camera. There’s also a microscope that sits atop a swiveling base and plugs directly into one of the laptop’s USB ports. Both peripherals run on Fedora-based software designed by the company.
OLPC will be bringing these out as soon as it can get the price down through manufacturing. For the France-designed telescope, the company is aiming for $10, with a potentially lower price on the microscope. The idea is to get one of each in a classroom, rather than the one-to-one approach of its XO line.
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